School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemThe effect of including non-native accents in English listening tests for young learners: psychometric and learner perspectives( 2015)As English has been used widely as a lingua franca for communication, language testers have started to evaluate the proposal for introducing non-native accents into the listening input of English tests. This study aims to further this debate from both the psychometric and learner perspectives by not only investigating how accents influence test takers’ performance, but also eliciting their subjective perception of accents. 80 young L1-Mandarin test takers were recruited and divided into four groups, with each group listening to one accented version of the same test. The four accents used in this study were Australian, Spanish, Vietnamese and Mandarin English accents. Test takers subsequently completed a Likert-scale questionnaire, which measured their accent perception on three sub-scales, Familiarity, Comprehension and Attitude. Results indicate that the Mandarin accent group performed significantly better than the other three groups in the test and also perceived the Mandarin accent significantly more comprehensible, lending support for the shared-L1 effect. No significant difference is observed among the three non-Mandarin groups whether in the test scores or the Comprehension sub-scale. There is no significant difference in test takers’ perception of the four accents in terms of Familiarity or Attitude. The central implication from this study is that there is potential for the inclusion of non-native accents into listening tests provided the shared-L1 effect can be properly addressed.
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ItemThe Expression of Location in Wumpurrarni English: Continua and Coherence in an Australian Contact Language( 2020)This thesis investigates the expression of static and dynamic location in Wumpurrarni English, a contact language spoken in central Australia which is derived from English, Warumungu, and other nearby contact languages. First, it offers a description of the morphosyntax and semantics of ‘locative phrases’ in the language – phrases which express location and contain a noun phrase plus optional locative markers – and discusses this in comparison to the source languages. Then it analyses the co-occurrence of morphemes in a locative phrase relative to the language they derive from, finding some degree of ‘lectal coherence’ but also a wide range of variation; the usage-based framework of schemas and constructions is applied to understand these findings. The results support the existence of a continuum in Wumpurrarni English but suggest it should be understood as multidimensional rather than linear.
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ItemFrom Afropea to the Afro-Atlantic: A study of four novels by Léonora Miano and Fatou Diome( 2019)Recent research in the field of Francophone African literature has suggested that contemporary Sub-Saharan authors living and writing in Europe present in their works a fundamentally devalorising image of their continent of origin. This is said to be reflective of their inherently negative rapport with their Africanicity, a degraded collective identitarian perception that finds its roots in the French colonial project South of the Sahara. Other scholars have argued that Africa no longer features, as it did in the works of previous generations of Sub-Saharan authors, as an important reference point for contemporary African authors who have turned their literary attention towards their own individual lives and to those of other African migrants in Europe. These writers are, according to some, relatively disinterested in their continent of origin and in the people who live there. This thesis considers the textual representation of the African continent and Africanicity in the novels of two contemporary Sub-Saharan authors writing in French on Africa from Europe – Leonora Miano from Cameroon and Fatou Diome from Senegal. Although these two authors are readily making names for themselves in the French and African literary scenes, they remain less studied in academia than many Francophone African male writers and other Francophone African women writers who have been writing for longer. The study seeks to determine whether Diome and Miano present in their texts a devalorising image of Sub-Saharan Africa and Africanicity more broadly or, conversely, whether there is evidence in their fiction of a commitment to a project of collective Afro-identitarian revalorisation. This study demonstrates a marked evolution across four novels by Miano and Diome through the theoretical concept of Afro-diasporic consciousness informed and developed upon by theory drawn from postcolonial, diaspora and feminist literary studies. It comparatively analyses Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (2003) and Miano’s L’interieur de la nuit (2005) followed by Diome’s Celles qui attendent (2010) and Miano’s Les aubes ecarlates: Sankofa cry (2009) to reveal the authors’ increasingly ardent commitment to rehabilitating and revalorising contemporary Africanicity through fiction. This revalorisation is shown to be dependent on movement beyond the bounds of binary and colonially-referential Afropea and towards transnational engagement with Africa’s Black Atlantic diaspora. The study ultimately suggests that Africa remains very much present in the literary and affective sensibilities of Miano and Diome.
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Item‘For noble and valiant France’: French-Australian relations, French Australian identities during the First World War( 2020)This thesis investigates the perception, projection, and mobilisation of French identity in Australia during the First World War. Australia’s participation on the Western Front from 1916 onwards meant that more Australians than ever before had a tangible connection with France, and it became a place of trauma as well as fascination. Yet, from the beginning of the conflict, French identity, language, and culture took on a heightened significance in Australia. French-Australians and their networks of francophones and francophiles played an important role in shaping this mobilisation of identity and culture, despite their numerically small proportion of the population. Drawing on a wide variety of French and Australian sources, this thesis examines the responses of French-Australians to the war and analyses how French identity was expressed in both civilian and military contexts. This thesis represents the first study to incorporate an extensive use of French sources to examine Australia’s First World War experience, and to analyse the role played by French-Australian relations. The French sources, notably the French diplomatic archives, demonstrate that the discourse regarding French identity was driven by a diverse range of people, in multiple spheres, and on many levels of society. French-Australian connections and networks based on social, political, cultural, and linguistic identities reveal a transnational influence which is not widely known. From diplomats and government officials, to businessmen, soldiers, charity workers and the ordinary man on the street, many people took part in, and were influenced by, the discourse. In the public domain, French national identity, French cultural imagery and essentialised images of France and French people were linked to the rhetoric of patriotism and were used to influence public opinion and support for the war. On the home front, the French-Australian fundraising organisations drew on transnational connections and successfully combined cultural representations with patriotism and fundraising. In the military sphere, French national identity had implications for men of military age who were subject to French military service obligations, and their experiences reveal a wide range of opinions and attitudes towards French identity. Examining how French identity was projected and mobilised, by whom, and for what purpose, provides a new perspective from which to understand this pivotal period of Australian and French shared history.
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ItemMotivation and demotivation in second language learning at Australian universities( 2020)This research aims to identify the main factors underlying the motivation and demotivation of beginner students learning French, German, Italian and Spanish at Australian universities considering the context in which L2 learners are embedded. The theoretical basis for this research project is provided by previous studies on motivation and demotivation as listed by Dornyei (2001b; 2020b). The analysis of psychological/internal, pedagogical and socio-contextual/external variables involved in L2 learning (for an overview see Dornyei & Ushioda, 2011; Ushioda, 2020) is structured into three levels: micro, meso and macro (cf. Gayton, 2018; Gruba et al., 2016). The three levels correspond to three factors which emerged from a principal components analysis: the Psychology of the Language Learner (PLL), the Learning Experience (LE) and the Socio-cultural Environment (SCE). The continuous interaction of L2 learners with dynamics of power, trends and social fashions within the society (Larsen-Freeman, 2001) where they actively construct their own identities (Norton, 2013) aligns with mainstream poststructuralist views of learning processes (McNamara, 2011). Mixed methods design was utilised to explore students’ motivation and demotivation over two semesters. A questionnaire (cf. Oakes, 2013; Sakai & Kikuchi, 2009; Kikuchi, 2015) was completed by 719 students enrolled in a number of Australian universities in April/May 2018. 206 students out of the 719 students who participated in the first phase of the data collection then completed a second questionnaire in September 2018. A small group of students enrolled at the University of Melbourne were interviewed after the end of the first (June 2018) and the second semesters (October/November 2018). Both quantitative and qualitative data analysis support the idea that all three factors at the three levels of analysis play a crucial role in student motivation and demotivation. Changes in motivation and demotivation were also observed during a year of L2 studies at university. Psychological and pedagogical reactions to the L2 learning process are deemed increasingly important for students over time, while the socio-cultural environment affects students’ interest in learning an L2 depending on their personal experience of an L2 in a specific context. Differences across the four L2 cohorts were also identified and explored.
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ItemTeaching Standard Australian English as a second dialect to Australian Indigenous children in primary school classrooms( 2020)Second Dialect Acquisition (SDA) might represent a conceptually different task to that of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) for three main related reasons. Firstly, the learner’s ability to ‘notice’ dialect differences due to the shared linguistic features of the two dialects, might make separation more difficult (Siegel, 2010b, p. 68; Wolfram & Schilling-Estes, 1998, p. 287). Secondly, due to the linguistic overlap between two related dialects, it is thought that speakers make themselves generally understood by one another and dialect differences can be considered ‘communicatively redundant’ (Long, 2007, p. 62). It has also been said that this can impact upon the learner’s motivation (Berry & Hudson, 1997) or levels of ‘investment’ (Peirce, 1995; Nero, 2014) in acquiring a second dialect. Lastly, the relationship between the two dialects can represent societal systems of inequality (Bourdieu, 1991) and therefore the identities of second dialect learners and their investment to learn the standard form needs to be positioned within this power dynamic (Malcolm & Koningsberg, 2001, p. 27; Peirce, 1995). In this thesis, two cross-sectional studies were undertaken. Firstly, Indigenous primary school aged children (6 to 12-years old) in Far North Queensland who spoke English as an additional language and/or dialect (EAL/D) (n = 54) participated in two tasks designed to understand whether dialect differences were noticed: elicited imitation of Standard Australian English (SAE) target sentences and an alternative forced choice task that asked participants whether two utterances were, verbatim, the “same” or “different”. Results were compared with native monolingual SAE speakers (n = 44) who did the same tasks. Secondly, a teaching intervention of three lessons that employed the ‘contrastive approach’ to SDA was conducted with Yarrie Lingo (YL) speaking participants in years 1, 3 and 5 (n = 27) to explore differences between YL and SAE and hopefully, improve participants’ ability to “notice” the differences. Findings showed that dialect differences were not always noticed for all participants, but for the EAL/D groups it was far more difficult to notice the grammatical features of SAE, and some features were more salient or readily acquired than others. Over the years of schooling, participants’ ability to notice the targeted SAE grammatical items improved. The teaching intervention showed that the YL group found it very difficult to effectively separate the two languages and code-switch between them, despite their explicit knowledge of the grammatical rules, suggesting SDA is potentially more difficult due to the slight linguistic distance between their first dialect, D1 and their second, D2. The argument for communicative redundancy is less convincing. In the space of a simple sentence, dialect differences were found to be communicatively redundant 29-30% of the time, which seems like a lot, but more often than not, the meaning was lost. In longer stretches of communication that extend beyond a simple sentence, particularly in the context of the academic demands of schooling, it is very likely that there will be a breakdown in communication between a YL speaker and an SAE speaker. Findings suggest that SDA presents a greater challenge not just for the slight linguistic differences between D1 and D2, but also for the complex social, cultural, historical and political factors that underpin D1 and D2 as nonstandard and standard languages. The argument presented is that children’s linguistic identities are crucial in SDA and that instruction must start there. Consequently, traditional hierarchical understandings of language awareness developmental processes, such as those described in the language awareness continuum (Angelo & Carter, 2015) need to be rethought. They position an examination of the social and historical factors influencing language in society as a higher order skill that is developed after language awareness and standard language proficiency is gained through contrastive analysis. This study suggests that students are unlikely to engage with contrastive analysis and standard language acquisition in a meaningful way, without first addressing their social and cultural realities. It is evident, however, that the learning needs of Indigenous Australian children who are acquiring SAE as a second dialect in the Australian schooling system, are not fully understood. Current research lacks evidence. This study sought to address this void, in doing so, it illustrates how linguistically and socially complex the situation is. SDA appears to significantly differ from traditional SLA in some very important and challenging ways, but much more research is urgently needed to address present-day inequities for Indigenous EAL/D learners in the schooling system.
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ItemHeroides ventriloquism in the Italian Baroque( 2020)Sixteen-hundred years after the Roman elegist Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ (c15–5 BCE) articulated the lament of abandoned heroines (and one historical figure: Sappho) writing and responding to their heroes, several male baroque poets re-ventriloquised Ovid’s epistolary interlocutors. Leading seventeenth-century literary presence Giambattista Marino was himself an early exponent of the form, which he describes as “imitated from Ovid” (“imitate da Ovidio”) in his ‘Lira’ (1614 CE). My research considers why and how these little-studied Seicento texts—produced by Marinist circles affiliated with the libertine Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti—reinterpret Ovid’s ventriloquism, and what this indicates about seventeenth-century attitudes toward gendered writing. A largely overlooked niche in the reception of Ovid’s unique elegies, many of these baroque poems are yet to be examined by scholars. My close readings compare the new ‘updates’ to popular early modern Latin and vernacular Italian ‘Heroides’ editions of the seventeenth century, revealing the significance of Ovid's collection for the dominance of elite men in Marinist literary culture.
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ItemRussian word order: the pragmatics of unconventional verb-initial types( 2020)In Russian, the statistically dominant order of the subject and the verb in the clause is SVO. However, in a number of linguistic environments, the verb precedes the subject, either following a language convention or establishing an unconventional pattern. This research project provides an account of unconventional verb-initial patterns (VIPs) – namely, VSO, VOS and VS – considering both the syntactic and the pragmatic factors that influence their occurrence in written discourse. Building on previous research of early Russian texts, this study extends the scope of investigation and analyses texts from six different genres and/or time periods: 15th-century travel diary, 18th-19th-century travel diaries, 19th-century classic folk tales, 20th-century narratives, 21st-century modern tales, and 21st-century blog entries. It is argued that unconventional VIPs are best understood within a single analytical framework which addresses pattern variation, information structure and communicative effects of VSO, VOS and VS word order combinations. Previous research accounted, to some extent, for the use of verb-initial word order variations in oral and written discourse, as grammatical, syntactic and, above all, stylistic means of information packaging. Specifically, the theory of functional sentence perspective has provided valuable insight into the information structure of Russian sentence elements, with individual studies outlining the pragmatic effects of using particular VIPs. However, there has been limited empirical investigation of unconventional VIPs across a range of genres and time periods, and little to no attention given to the significance of pattern variation within and across VIPs. Overall, the results of this study show that the use of unconventional VIPs has not only declined over the modern Russian period, but that there is substantial variation across genres, both in terms of the VSO, VOS and VS groups of patterns and in terms of their correlation with information structure and communicative effects. Furthermore, the study reveals that across the six corpora: VOS patterns are infrequent, compared to VSO and VS combinations; VS modified by adjuncts is the most frequently occurring VIP; and VSO without adjuncts (i.e. pure VSO) with Split Rheme information structure is the strongest correlation of word order and information structure. Furthermore, VSO combinations also strongly correlate with discourse management effects in all corpora and with syntactic communicative effects in the 18th-19th-century travel diaries, while VS patterns produce both syntactic and stylistic communicative effects in the 15th-century travel diary. Moreover, the second most prominent group of communicative effects is discourse management devices, particularly, in the 20th-century narratives and the 21st-century modern tales, which are produced by unconventional VIPs with Split Rheme information structure. Rhematised Verb information structure producing stylistic communicative effects was found to be a feature of the 19th-century classic folk tales, whereas Clause Focus producing stylistic effects were found to be a feature of 21st-century blog entries. Finally, this study shows that the 15th-century travel diary stands apart from the five modern Russian corpora in terms of pattern variation, information packaging and pragmatic use, signalling that more research of this early Russian period is warranted.
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ItemLinguistic landscapes of Chinese communities in Australia( 2020)Deeper and wider processes of globalisation have contributed to increased mobility in society. As more people move across borders along with their personal histories, cultures and languages, transnational places and diaspora communities have become ideal sites of research (Arnaut, Blommaert, Rampton, & Spotti, 2016; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015). Recently, there has been unprecedented interest in sociolinguistic phenomena in superdiverse, metropolitan cities, giving rise to the emergence of linguistic landscape research. Linguistic landscape originally referred to the languages used on publicly visible street signs, such as shop signs, advertisements and road signs (Ben-Rafael, Shohamy, Amara, & Trumper-Hecht, 2006). Later, the definition was expanded to account for the use of all semiotic resources, including linguistic forms, in the public arena (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010). Despite ongoing efforts to document and describe urban landscapes in different parts of the world (Blackwood, Lanza, & Woldemariam, 2016), little work to date has attempted to formulate a comprehensive response to recent trends in linguistic landscape research. As a fledgling field of study, linguistic landscape research has received wide criticism for employing a crude type of quantitative analysis that regards languages as clearly definable units (Blommaert, 2019). The fact that the linguistic landscape perspective can incorporate different fields of sociolinguistics, such as research on minority languages, also raises questions about its theoretical and methodological paths (Van Mensel, Vandenbrouke, & Blackwood, 2017). Drawing on frameworks grounded in geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003), superdiversity (Blommaert, 2013) and metrolingualism (Pennycook, 2017), this thesis aims to interrogate the theory, methodology, framing of power and relevance of linguistic landscape research. For this purpose, I employ an ethnographically oriented approach to examine three complex case studies of the linguistic landscapes of Chinese communities in Victoria, Australia. Throughout the thesis, I gradually construct the coherent argument that linguistic landscape research benefits from a geosemiotic theory, an ethnographic methodology, a social semiotic perspective to power relations and an exploration of social media landscape. Findings of the three case studies shed light on how semiotic resources are purposefully employed to construct nostalgia, power and identity. Overall, the thesis expands the theoretical and methodological reach of linguistic landscape research by interrogating the urban-centric perspective, adopting an assemblage view of sign systems, offering a triadic framework for power relations, and pushing the boundaries of linguistic landscapes.
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ItemAcoustic cues to prominence and phrasing in bilingual speech( 2020)This dissertation investigates the prosodic structure of French and the Oceanic language Drehu, spoken by a small bilingual community on the island of Lifou, in the South Pacific. Lifou is a remote island belonging to the archipelago of New Caledonia, localised more than 16000 km away from mainland France. Although officially a French overseas territory, live in Lifou is to a large degree organised according to customary tradition of the indigenous population, the Kanak people. There is no obvious societal majority language on the island and French and Drehu are commonly spoken by the indigenous population, who make up the majority of the inhabitants. The aim of this examination is to develop a phonetic prosodic model for the two languages and determine whether there are effects of prosodic transfer between the two languages of bilingual speakers. Of particular interest is the the phonetic description of prominence and phrasing of the two languages for a categorisation of their prosodic typology. This thesis presents five studies dealing with (i) the acoustics of Drehu word prosody, (ii) the acoustic correlates of intonational structure in Lifou French, (iii) the acoustic durational properties of Lifou French, (iv) the acoustics of prominence marking and phrasing in Drehu, and (v) acoustic cues used in word recognition in Drehu and French. The speech and perception data for these studies were collected during four field work trips to the island of Lifou, where more than 100 adult and teenage speakers participated. To investigate processing in the French language and incorporate a monolingual control group, additional experimental work was conducted in the facilities of the Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix Marseille University, CNRS, in Aix-en-Provence, in metropolitan France. A variety of methods, typically used in laboratory phonology, such as controlled reading tasks or a forced choice word identification experiment were employed. For exploration and interpretation of the data, all five studies include a statistical analysis. This work puts forward a revised model of Drehu word prosody and postulates an intonation phonological account of the language. In addition, the intonational phonology of Lifou French is documented, providing the first description of this previously undocumented variety. Building on this descriptive work and taking into consideration previous phonetic research on the speech production and prosody of bilingual speakers, the role of sociolinguistic motivations and functional constraints is discussed. This dissertation highlights the relevance of applying detailed acoustic descriptions to under-documented languages which are poorly understood regarding their prosodic systems. It contributes to the documentation of the languages in the Oceanic region and advances our understanding of bilingual speech processes.