Weekly Seminars - First Semester 2005

Unless otherwise indicated, all seminars are on Fridays, beginning at 2.30 pm in Room 110, the Transient Building, Camperdown Campus.
[NOTE change of room from previous years].

They are followed by afternoon tea in the Tea-room.
All are welcome.

For further information: Jane Simpson, 9351-3655,
E-mail: jhs AT mail.usyd.edu.au

Computer-aided fieldwork and databases for Indigenous languages

This is an all-day workshop starting at 9.30 in Transient Room 110.

In this session we will discuss a workflow that starts with a recorded digital file and moves through to a transcribed and then interlinearised data, using Shoebox to link to a lexical database. The tools illustrated will be Transcriber, Audiamus, and Shoebox, with passing mention of regular expressions.

9.30 - 11 Nick Thieberger

a. Overview ­ the need for well-structured data
Benefits for our everyday work as well as for longterm reuse of the data. Illustration of a workflow for linguistic data.
b. Time-aligned transcription using Transcriber (Elan also discussed), illustration of a media corpus using Audiamus
c. Time-aligned transcripts into interlinearising software ­Shoebox
(+Toolbox)
d. Using a controlled vocabulary in interlinearising to establish a
lexicon/dictionary ­ Shoebox

11 - 11.30 Morning tea and discussion

11.30 - 12 Tour of PARADISEC

12 - 1 Lunch

1- 2.30 Nick Thieberger

a. Dictionary functions in Shoebox
b. Interlinearising with Shoebox
c. Manipulating text with regular expressions so that it can move between the various applications.
d. If there's time, a brief illustration of outputs of Shoebox in Kirrkirr and LexiquePro

2.30 -3 Tom Honeyman: XML and the Ngardi lexicon

3 - 3.30 Afternoon tea

3.30 - 4 Baden Hughes and Michael Walsh
The NSW Aboriginal Languages Research and Resource Database

4 - 4.30 Baden Hughes and Patrick McConvell
The AIATSIS Web Indigenous Languages Database

Catherine T. Best
Perceptual Assimilation: Effects of Native Language Experience on Non-native Speech Perception by Adults and Infants

Although our auditory systems can obviously take in the acoustic details of speech in any language, a large body of evidence indicates that native language experience places strong and systematic constraints on speech perception. Not only labeling and goodness ratings, but also discrimination, of non-native consonant and vowel contrasts are often substantially hindered in comparison to perception of phonological contrasts from the native language. Studies with young infants, on the other hand, have shown an initial, universal ability to discriminate speech sounds from both the ambient language and unfamiliar languages alike. Thus, language experience exerts a sort of “tuning” effect on perception of speech sometime between infancy and adulthood. Other research with infants has revealed that this attunement to the sound properties of the native language is already apparent before the infant’s first birthday, specifically, by 10 months of age for consonant sounds, and even earlier for vowel sounds. In my talk I will discuss research with infants and adults that has investigated how and why experience with the native language comes to exert this influence on perception. Of particular interest are findings showing that while many non-native consonant and vowel contrasts are difficult to categorize and discriminate, not all of them cause perceptual difficulties to non-native listeners. In fact, some appear quite easy to discriminate despite being quite “exotic” with respect to the native phonological system. Several theoretical explanations of these perceptual variations among non-native speech contrasts will be examined, and a range of findings will be discussed, with particular emphasis on the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) that I have developed to address those perceptual variations.

Francis Britto
Disentangling Diglossia

Since Ferguson's paper on diglossia in 1959, 'diglossia' has come
to be used in many senses, especially due to Fishman 1967, which extended Ferguson's concept. Some (e.g. Timm 1981, Fasold 1984) have tried to isolate the different senses of diglossia with the aim of grouping the so-called diglossias into congruent types. This presentation shows that the diglossic
typologies proposed so far are either incomplete or ambiguous, and hopes to provide a more satisfactory interpretation of Ferguson's theory and Fishman's extension. A correct understanding of diglossia helps us not only to name certain well-defined sociolinguistic situations but also to draw conclusions about the desirability, usefulness, and consequences of such
situations.

Julian Edge
Non-judgmental discourse: A role and roles

This presentation focuses on the use of non-judgmental discourse in professional self-development among peers. The discourse framework will be outlined and clips shown of colleagues (in this case, university lecturers) engaged in the work. Prospects for further developments in practice and theorisation will be sketched and comment invited.

Rod Gardner
Conversation Analysis and Linguistics: Where's the interaction?

Conversation Analysis (CA) has had a growing influence in the study of discourse, language acquisition and social interaction in recent years. Increasing numbers of linguists interested in discourse are using at least some CA tools, or are paying attention to claims and findings emerging from CA research. Nevertheless misunderstandings persist about, for example, 'theory' in CA, its methodology and tools of analysis, its conceptualisation of the 'social', and the status of its findings. I will attempt in this talk to sketch CA's ontological focus, and its epistemological basis. The object of enquiry in CA is talk-in-interaction. This includes language as a central facet, but more than language, and the way to understanding talk is through members' understandings, methods and practices as revealed by a close analysis of the talk, using the tools of transcription and the five 'pillars' of CA: turn-taking, turn design, sequence organisation, repair and action. One way to understand the talk may be intuitive, relying on the analyst's knowledge as a member of the community of speakers. Another way is through analysis focusing on the five pillars. A demonstration of this latter technique will be presented through one or two pieces of conversational data.

Adrian Heathcote
'Conditionals as Functions'

'Even the crows on the roofs caw about the nature of conditionals' said Callimachus, Librarian of Alexandria, in 300 BC. Today we are in a similar position: there are almost as many theories of conditionals as there are philosophers and linguistis who think about them. Still, there is an emerging orthodoxy—represented by Jonathan Bennett's A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals. In this, indicatives are treated quite differently to subjunctives, and the former, as a rule, lack truth values while the latter always possess them. In this paper I describe a unified theory of conditionals (undifferentiated from hypotheticals) with the same truth conditions for indicatives and subjunctives. I argue that it gives the right answer to several classic problems: the Sly Pete cases (of Gibbard 1981) and the vexed relationship with material implications. I suggest that the account gives a better representation of what English speakers mean when they use conditionals.

Bennett, Jonathan. 2003. A philosophical guide to conditionals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dudman, Vic 1984 'Conditional Interpretations if 'If' sentences'
Australian Journal of Linguistics, 4, 143–204

Gibbard, Allan 1981. "Two Recent Theories of Conditionals", W.L. Harper, R. Stalnaker, and G. Pearce (eds.), Ifs: Conditionals, Beliefs, Decision, Chance, and Time (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1981), 211-247.

Caroline Jones
Ngarinyman language and children's receptive knowledge

Heritage language speakers, people who identify with and/or grew up overhearing a community language at home, can differ from other early bilinguals in their proficiency in the heritage language. Some research suggests that heritage language speakers tend to differ from other early bilinguals more in their knowledge of the lexicon and syntax, and less in their knowledge of phonology where they may be indistinguishable from monolingual native speakers (e.g., Au, Knightly, Jun, & Oh, 2002). The educational implications of such results for later relearning have also been investigated to some extent (Tees & Werker, 1984; de Bot & Stoessel, 2000). This talk discusses the rationale and plans for research into heritage language proficiency in the traditional language among childhood overhearers of Ngarinyman, an endangered Aboriginal language of the central-west NT. Specifically, the research aims to investigate the extent to which young (5-9 year old) children's processing for syntax and phonology in Ngarinyman is still adapted to the traditional language or is influenced by English- or Kriol-derived forms, as compared with older community members.

Jennifer Munro
Morphosyntactic substrate influences in Kriol

While the field of creolistics is peppered with accounts of substrate transfer there has as yet been no framework accepted with which to identify such features with regard to the potential likelihood of transfer.

In order to investigate substrate influence in Roper Kriol, a creole language of Northern Australia, the Transfer Constraints approach (Siegel 1997 and 2000) has been used in order to limit and predict potential transfer. The six substrate languages of the Roper River region have been compared using the Reinforcement Principle, which suggests that core features of a language have the greatest chance of being retained during levelling. The Availability Constraints of perceptual salience and congruence provide explanations of the possibility of transfer.

This paper briefly provides the sociohistorical background to the emergence of Roper Kriol, with particular emphasis on the gradual emergence of the creole and therefore when transfer and levelling is most likely to have taken place, as well as on the role of cattle stations in its development. This paper also discusses substrate influence in relation to core features from the substrate languages' verb and nominal templates. It is shown that there is evidence of substrate influence in Kriol and that the Transfer Constraints approach can provide a means of limiting the potential transfer and thereby explaining why or why not transfer has taken place.

Ghil`ad Zuckermann
'Is it possible to revive a language?: The case of Israeli'

This paper will examine whether Hebrew has been revived (without changing its linguistic nature). Israelis are still indoctrinated to believe that they speak "the language of Isaiah (with mistakes)", i.e. that Israeli is purely Semitic: (Biblical/Mishnaic) Hebrew revived. The revisionist, "anti-Semitic" position defines Israeli as Indo-European: Yiddish "relexified" (i.e. Yiddish with Hebrew words). This paper argues that Israeli, the world's youngest language, is simultaneously Semitic and Indo-European: Both Hebrew and Yiddish (the revivalists' mother tongue) act as its "primary contributors", with numerous secondary contributors. Thus, the term "Israeli" is far more appropriate than the misleading "Israeli Hebrew", let alone "Modern Hebrew" or "Hebrew" tout court.

The mosaic (rather than Mosaic) nature of Israeli has important theoretical implications for revival/survival (both occur in Israeli), linguistic genetics and typology, creolistics, mixed languages, sociolinguistics and language contact. It demonstrates that genetic affiliation - at least in the case of (semi-)engineered, "non-genetic" languages - is not discrete but rather a continuous line. Thus, the comparative method of reconstruction - though useful in many cases - cannot alone explain the "genetics" of ALL languages.

Linguists who seek to apply the lessons of Israeli to the revival of
unspoken Australian languages (e.g. Amery 2000) should take warning. Although revivalists have engaged in a campaign for linguistic purity, the language they created often mirrors the very cultural differences they sought to erase. The study of Israeli casts light on the dynamics between language and culture in general and in particular into the role of language as a source of collective self-perception.

Amery, Robert. 2000. Warrabarna Kaurna! : reclaiming an Australian language: Multilingualism and linguistic diversity. Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger.