School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemDoing it for Ourselves: The New Archive Built by and Responsive to the Researcher(Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, 2023)In this paper I address the following research questions in the context of having built a research data repository to safeguard cultural research data. How can the PARADISEC team ensure the records we create in the course of our research will exist into the future and remain citable? How can our research data be made available for a wider public, most importantly for the people recorded and their descendants? How can we prepare our students for this new approach to curation of primary research data so that they can build good methodology into their normal research practice, with much more productive outcomes?
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ItemReflections on software and technology for language documentation( 2020-01-01)Technological developments in the last decades enabled an unprecedented growth in volumes and quality of collected language data. Emerging challenges include ensuring the longevity of the records, making them accessible and reusable for fellow researchers as well as for the speech communities. These records are robust research data on which verifiable claims can be based and on which future research can be built, and are the basis for revitalization of cultural practices, including language and music performance. Recording, storage and analysis technologies become more lightweight and portable, allowing language speakers to actively participate in documentation activities. This also results in growing needs for training and support, and thus more interaction and collaboration between linguists, developers and speakers. Both cutting-edge speech technologies and crowdsourcing methods can be effectively used to overcome bottlenecks between different stages of analysis. While the endeavour to develop a single all-purpose integrated workbench for documentary linguists may not be achievable, investing in robust open interchange formats that can be accessed and enriched by independent pieces of software seems more promising for the near future.
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ItemWhen Your Data is My Grandparents Singing. Digitisation and Access for Cultural Records, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)(Ubiquity Press, Ltd., 2022-04-04)In this paper we discuss the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), a research repository that explicitly aims to act as a conduit for research outputs to a range of audiences, both within and outside of academia. PARADISEC has been operating for 19 years, and has grown to hold over 390,000 files currently totaling 150 terabytes and representing 1,312 languages, many of them from Papua New Guinea and the Pacific. Our focus is on recordings and transcripts in the many small languages of the world, the songs and stories that are unique cultural expressions. While this research data is created for a particular project, it has huge value beyond academic research as it is typically oral tradition recorded in places where little else has been recorded. There is an increasing focus in academia on reproducible research and research data management, and repositories are the key to successful data management. We discuss the importance for research practice of having discipline-specific repositories. The data in our work is also cultural material that has value to the people recorded and their descendants, it is their grandparents and so we, as outsider researchers, have special responsibilities to treat the materials with respect and to ensure they are accessible to the people we have worked with.
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ItemDigital curation and access to recordings of traditional cultural performance.(UNESCO, 2021)Being home to over a quarter of the world’s languages, the Pacific is a particularly good place to focus on how language records can be made accessible. The creation and description of research records has not always been a priority for humanities academics and any records that are created have typically not been provided with good archival solutions. This is despite these records often being of cultural or historical relevance beyond academia. Many cultural agencies struggle to keep track of recordings they have made, and it is the same for many researchers. Often it is only when researchers prepare recordings for archiving that they realize how many (or few) are described adequately, or have been transcribed or translated.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableBreathing digital life into Oceanic language corpora(OpenEdition, 2021-01-01)
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ItemNafsan(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2023-08)Nafsan (ISO 639-3: erk, Glottocode: sout2856), also known as South Efate, is a Southern Oceanic language of Vanuatu. It is spoken in Erakor, Eratap and Pango, three villages situated along the southern coast of the island of Efate (Figure 1) (Clark 1985, Lynch 2000, Thieberger 2006). Nafsan is also closely related to Eton, Lelepa, Nakanamanga and Namakura, spoken further to the north on Efate and some smaller neighbouring islands.1 Nafsan is often described as the southernmost member of the North-Central Vanuatu group of languages, and the Nafsan and Eton-speaking communities are noted to be at the core of ‘an unmistakable area of innovation’ compared to their northern neighbours (Clark 1985: 25). Though crosslinguistic comparisons suggest a clear boundary between North-Central Vanuatu languages and languages of the Southern Vanuatu group, there is evidence that Nafsan speakers have both linguistic and cultural links to the southern islands, suggestive of complex historical relationships between the populations of the central and southern regions (Lynch 2004; Thieberger 2007, 2015). In terms of the sound system, Nafsan is noted to be of particular interest because it ‘forms a transition between the phonologically more conservative languages to the north and the more “aberrant” languages to the south’ (Lynch 2000: 320), and exhibits phonotactic patterns which are complex and typologically uncommon, particularly among Oceanic languages (Thieberger 2006).
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ItemTechnology in Support of Languages of The Pacific: Neo-Colonial or Post-Colonial?(Logos Verlag, 2020)The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) has been digitising recordings of traditional cultural expression, oral tradition, and music (TCE) for 17 years. A major motivation for this work is the return of these recordings to where they were made. On the one hand there is social justice in preserving records of languages that are under-represented in the internet and cultural institutions, and making them accessible in what can be characterised as a postcolonial restitution of these records. On the other hand, if it is first world academics doing this work, it risks being yet another colonial appropriation of Indigenous knowledge. In this paper I explore some of these issues to help set directions both for our own work, and for future similar projects. “From ancient times to the present, disquieting use has been made of archival records to establish, document, and perpetuate the influence of power elites.” (Jimerson, 2007: 254). A quarter of the world’s languages are found in the Pacific. In communities sustained over many hundreds of years by local economies, the globalised world impinges through urbanisation and encroaching metropolitan languages, particularly in media, accelerating language change and language shift. Technology, in the form of computers, digital files, and ways of working with them, is a first world product, access to it is costly, and the interface to it is never in a local language but always in a major metropolitan language. Training and experience in using technology is not easily obtained, leading to a divide between those who are able to use it and those who are consumers of it, typically via expensive internet connections. How can a new kind of archival enterprise “establish, document, and perpetuate” the languages and their speakers, in order to counter what Jimerson calls the influence of power elites.
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ItemPhonetic evidence for phonotactic change in Nafsan (South Efate)(Pacini Editore SpA, 2020)Nafsan, an Oceanic language of central Vanuatu, is notable for the complex phonotactic structures it exhibits compared to languages spoken further to the north, and compared to the general preference for CV syllables among Oceanic languages. Various types of heterorganic consonant clusters are found in syllable onsets, and are thought to have arisen from the loss of selected medial vowels. Medial vowel deletion is suggested to be a process of change which has been underway for some time in the language, but the details of how this process operates have not been fully clear. Unresolved questions relating to the status of length in the vowel system and the location of lexical prominence have posed a challenge to arriving at a detailed description of vowel deletion and its consequences. Drawing together recent phonetic analyses and previous work, this paper provides an overview of phonotactic structures in contemporary Nafsan and outlines the main factors which lead to the deletion of medial vowels and result in the complex syllable onsets observed today.
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ItemAcoustic evidence for right-edge prominence in Nafsan(AIP Publishing LLC, 2020)Oceanic languages are often described as preferring primary stress on penultimate syllables, but detailed surveys show that many different types of prominence patterns have been reported across and within Oceanic language families. In some cases, these interact with segmental and phonotactic factors, such as syllable weight. The range of Oceanic prominence patterns is exemplified across Vanuatu, a linguistically diverse archipelago with over 130 languages. However, both impressionistic and instrumentally-based descriptions of prosodic patterns and their correlates are limited for languages of this region. This paper investigates prominence in Nafsan, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu for which previous observations of prominence differ. Acoustic and durational results for disyllabic and trisyllabic Nafsan words show a clear pattern of higher fundamental frequency values in final syllables, regardless of vowel length, pointing towards a preference for prominence at the right edge of words. Short vowels also show centralisation in penultimate syllables, providing supporting evidence for right-edge prominence and informing the understanding of vowel deletion processes in Nafsan.