School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses

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End date: 2019 × Start date: 2010 × Subject: Australian Indigenous languages ×

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    Australian Indigenous language learner’s guides for revitalisation: language acquisition and materials evaluation
    Chiang, Yu-Ting ( 2019)
    Given that many Australian Indigenous communities have undergone language loss and wish to (re)learn their heritage language, and that existing learner’s guides for these languages written by linguists are limited in their pedagogical capacities, this study is set out to investigate the current state and possible improvement of learner’s guides in response to Penfield and Tucker’s (2011) call for applied linguists with an expertise in language acquisition to step into this area. Specifically, this present study first adopts the learner-centred second language acquisition (SLA) stance and interviews four community-based language workers to identify the learning goals and needs of Indigenous communities. The study also evaluates nine existing learner’s guides published over the past four decades with Tomlinson’s (2010, 2011, 2016) principles proposed for SLA materials development as the fundamental framework. Findings suggest that one of the major learning goals of Indigenous communities be communicative competence, which matches with Tomlinson’s (2016) emphasis. Additionally, comprehensibility is the most salient issue of learner’s guides at present. To compare the insights of the interviewees in this study and the results of the learner’s guides evaluation, it is found that the SLA frameworks adopted in this study can indeed inform future development of learner’s guides for Australian Indigenous languages, but the application requires modifications in order to achieve cultural appropriateness, especially considering the colonial history of Australia. Beyond learner’s guides per se, the governing principle of future learner’s guides development is to have community consultation, involvement, and ideally, initiation. Positioned as an initial attempt to bridge language revitalisation and SLA, this study provides novel perspectives to both fields, introducing a theoretically and practically informed approach to develop pedagogical materials for Indigenous languages and an insight into a less studied audience in SLA research.
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    Tiwi revisited: a reanalysis of traditional Tiwi verb morphology
    Wilson, Aidan ( 2013)
    Traditional Tiwi is a language isolate within the Australian language group, traditionally spoken on the Tiwi Islands, north of Darwin. This language exhibits the most complex verb structure of any Australian language. Altogether there are 18 distinct verb slots; 14 prefixes and 4 suffixes. They encode subject, object and oblique arguments, they inflect for tense, aspect and mood, the location and direction of events with respect to the speaker, and the time of day that an event takes place. They also take prefixes and suffixes denoting associated motion, can be argument-raised by a causative or detransitivised by derivational morphology, and can take incorporated nominals, incorporated verbs, and incorporated comitative or privative arguments. Traditional Tiwi has not been adequately described. Previous descriptions are limited and do not cover verb morphology with enough detail. This thesis brings together previous descriptions, early recorded data, and adds newly collected data and findings to produce an updated description of the language, with special reference to the verb morphology. I focus in particular on two aspects of the verb morphology: agreement and incorporation. The Traditional Tiwi agreement system of inflecting verbs shows a high degree of complexity due to the interactions between subject, object and tense marking. I argue for the occurrence of an otherwise unreported phenomenon by which agreement affixes can shift between various controllers depending on the morphosyntactic context. Incorporation is also highly complex, as with other northern Australian languages that exhibit this feature. There are four distinct types of incorporation including verb incorporation, comitative and privative constructions, body part incorporation and regular nominal incorporation. I describe these with reference to incorporation phenomena in other Australian languages. Traditional Tiwi however, is no longer spoken; the last two speakers died in 2012. The majority of the data on which this thesis is based was collected with one of these two last speakers, and therefore represents possibly the last documentary linguistic record of this important language.