News

October 2009

Summer Research Scholarships

The Department of Linguistics has received two Summer Research Scholarships for the coming break (December 2009 - January 2010). This compares very well to nine overall in the College of Asia Pacific (CAP). The two summer research scholars are Emma Kuperus and Ada Chong. While at the department, they will work on their projects, supervised by Mark Donohue. Emma Kuperus will be working on voice and agreement reanalysis in Austronesian, focussing on precursors of the Polynesian passive suffix -Cia. She's arriving from Winifred Bauer at Wellington. Adam Chong will be looking at subsegmental morphology in the Skou languages of northern New Guinea. He's coming from the University of Melbourne.

Fieldwork

• Nick Evans is currently in the field in PNG. This is his second trip to the Trans-Fly area Southern New Guinea. He will be in the field for four weeks, and will be back at the department on 18th October.
• Yusuf Sawaki is in Manokwari, West Papua, Indonesia. He is back to the field to collect more data for his PhD project on Wooi ---an Austronesian language of Yapen Island, West Papua, Indonesia spoken by around 1,800 speakers. His project is also part of language documentation funded Volkswagen Foundation Germany. Yusuf's PhD at the ANU is sponsored by the MPI, Leipzig, Germany.
• Sébastien Lacrampe is back to Vanuatu, after briefly in Canberra in early September. Sébastien's PhD thesis is on Lelepa, an oceanic language of central Vanuatu spoken by around 500 speakers.
• Stef Spronck is in the field, in the Kimberly, Western Australia. Stef is working with the Aboriginal community of Mowanjum. Stef's PhD project is on reported speech and thought in Ngarinyin, which is also part of the ARC-funded research project on social cognition and language, led by Nick Evans.
• Chikako Senge has been in the field, in Halls Creek, since April. She is collecting data for her PhD project, working there with speakers of the endangered Wanyjirra language.

Visiting Fellows

• Dr. Maia Ponsonnet is a Visiting Fellow at the department from 1 September 2009 to 30 September 2010. Maia's visit is supported by a grant from the IATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies). Her project is Semantics of Emotions in Dalabon and Kriol. She arrive at the department in early September to start the fellowship. She is now in the field in South-Western Arnhem Land (Weemol, Beswick) to work with her consultants to finalise the trilingual glossary and to gather authorisations for her project.

  Maia got her PhD in Philosophy from Paris-8-Saint-Denis University in 2005, with a thesis entitled Comparing Languages Games: Ways of seeing the World of Dalabon People, Nothern Australia.

• Mr Eh Nyotkhampheuy visited the department in September, working with Paul Sidwell on the Nyaheun Folk Narrative Project, funded by the MPI Leipzig Germany. Mr Nyotkhampheuy is a native speaker of Nyaheun, a small Bahnaric (Austroasiatic) language spoken on the Boloven Plateau in southern Laos. In 1995 there were around 5,000 people identified as Nyaheun. Many still practice traditional swidden farming and hunting, although the language and lifestyle are now seriously endangered.

September 2009

Tutoring

Fiona Blake just joined the department as a tutor. Here is how she described herself. "I've just arrived in Canberra to join my partner, Tom Honeyman, who is a PhD student here at RSPAS Linguistics. I've recently returned from the Marshall Islands, where I spent a year on Imroj, Jaluit (a tiny island just 1km long by 300m at its widest point) as a volunteer English Teacher with the US organisation WorldTeach. This semester I am tutoring for the new course 'Languages of the Pacific', which is being coordinated by Nick Evans and then team taught by a number of members of this department. I was keen to take on this role as over the last few years I've learnt a fair bit about three Pacific languages, Marshallese and then Momu and Tok Pisin (the languages spoken in Mori village, Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea, where I did fieldwork for my honours thesis in 2005-06). And so it's a great opportunity for me to gain a broader understanding of the Pacific area as a whole. In the meantime I'll be investigating ideas for PhD projects, which I hope to begin next year (quite possibly here at RSPAS!).

Grants

• Congratulations to Chikako Senge who obtained a doctoral grant of GBP 74,000 from the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Program to support her fieldwork on the Documentation and Description of Wanyjirra, a language of the Kimberley region, Australia.
• A team headed by Nick Evans obtained a project grant of EUR 60,000 from the Volkswagenstiftung's DoBeS program to support further work on the Iwaidja language. Most of these funds will be used to support additional fieldwork, transcription and translation of existing materials by Bruce Birch, but there will be some additional fieldwork support for Robert Mailhammer to carry out work on Amurdak and Linda Barwick to continue her ethnomusicological research on Cobourg song traditions.

Visitor

From 24-27th August the department hosted a brief visit by Prof. Midori Osumi (Tokyo Women's Christian University), en route to her fieldwork in New Caledonia on Tinrin and Neku. Neku is a previously undescribed, highly endangered Melanesian language. She is working on its grammar and collecting data for a comprehensive dictionary. While visiting the department she attended an Anthropology Seminar (Reciprocity in Language and Beyond) presented by Anneliese Kuhle, and a grammar-writing seminar conducted by Nick Evans on 26 August. She immensely enjoyed her short stay at her old alma mater and appreciated very much the warm friendship extended to her by the colleagues she met. She is very grateful to the department for providing her with computer access and an office.

Languages of the Pacific

The department's new subject, Languages of the Pacific, kicked off on August 19th. This subject is intended to build the linguistic offerings within the newly developing Pacific Studies major, and is being team-taught by all members of the department, with Fiona Blake tutoring.

Seminars series

After a long break as most of the staff members and students were away June-July, our seminar series has resumed. The first cycle of the Grammar-writing group meeting in this semester was held on Wednesday 19 August. The topic of this cycle is 'word-classes'. The first meeting was an orientation to the topic presented by Nick Evans.

There are also other seminar series run by the department. The full program can be viewed at http://rspas.anu.edu.au/linguistics/seminars.php. If you want to give a presentation, contact Wayan Arka (wayan.arka@anu.edu.au).

Morning tea

The regular monthly morning tea of semester 2 held on Wednesday 19 August. This is a tradition initiated by Nick Evans last year. (In addition to this, we also still have regular morning and afternoon teas in Coombs tea room.) The monthly Departmental morning tea once a month is intended to be a social event for people of the department and guests to get together, and share news and other things currently going on at the department.

Pacific Linguistics

The following are new releases from Pacific Linguistics:

Leo Tuai: A comparative lexical study of North and Central Vanuatu languages by Ross Clark, 297 pp 2009 ISBN 9780858836006, Prices: Australia AUD $97.90 (incl. GST), Overseas AUD $89.00

The Austronesian languages by Robert Blust, PL 602, 852 pp, 2009 ISBN 9780858836020, Prices: Australia AUD $198.00 (incl. GST), Overseas AUD $180.00

Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history: a festschrift for Robert Blust edited by Alexander Adelaar and Andrew Pawley, PL 601, 554 pp, 2009 ISBN 9780858836013, Prices: Australia AUD $143.00 (incl. GST), Overseas AUD $130.00.

More information about PL and other books published by PL, and how to order them, can be viewed at http://pacling.anu.edu.au/.

August 2009

Conference presentations

The ALS Conference, Melbourne: Keynote speaker

Dr Alex François, our Visiting Fellow from LACITO-CNRS (France), was invited to give a keynote address at the Annual Meeting of the Australian Linguistics Society, which was held in Melbourne in early July, organised by La Trobe University and the RCLT. He there proposed a synthesis of his ongoing research on the 17 Oceanic languages of north Vanuatu. Entitled "Local words, shared ideas: Lexical divergence and structural homogeneity among north Vanuatu languages", his talk aimed at discussing the sociolinguistic underpinnings of language change, in an area where genetically closely related languages show signs both of strong divergence, and of intense convergence due to contact. This reflection triggered a number of fruitful comments from ALS participants, comparing the Vanuatu evolution with different areas and families in the world.

Other presentations at the ALS conference

• Earlier on, Dr François had attended 11·ical, the 11th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (http://www.vjf.cnrs.fr/11ical) of which he was one of the organisers. The spectacular setting of Aussois, a village in the French Alps, largely explained why the conference was felt to be a success by all participants. François' paper "Verbal number and Suppletion in Hiw" dealt with a grammatical strategy of number-based verbal suppletion which is very rare among Austronesian languages, yet highly developed in Hiw, a language of north Vanuatu. This research forms part of his current project to write a description of this innovative Oceanic language, during his 2-year CNRS Fellowship at the ANU (2009-2010).
• Dr Robert Mailhammer attended the Annual Meeting of the Australian Linguistics Society in Melbourne (9-11 July), where he gave a paper on the historical development of the verb system in the Iwaidjan languages.
• Mark Donohue also presented a (co-authored) paper at the ALS conference in Melbourne. The paper is entitled 'Methodological explorations in historical linguistics: Typological feature analysis does not replicate phylogeny'.

LFG09, Cambridge

Wayan Arka presented a paper at the LFG09 (Lexical Functional Grammar) conference at Cambridge University 15 July 2009. The paper entitled 'A linguistic and computational morphosyntactic analysis for the applicative -i in Indonesian' reports the findings and progress of Wayan's ARC-funded project on electronic grammar development for Indonesian. The paper discusses the linguistic issues of the precise analysis of the suffix -i and challenges in its computational implementation. A novel argument-structure based analysis is proposed. The new claims include the suffix -i as a polysemous suffix and complex predicate formation involving underspecified argument fusion of two kinds (double or single fusion). These key points, together with the argument structure and conceptual semantic properties of the base, account for different functions of -i (applicatives and causatives) which may or may not increase the syntactic transitivity of the base.

The LSA Institute, Berkeley

The Department has been strongly represented at the six-week Summer Institute of the Linguistics Society of America, held this year at Berkeley. The Summer Institutes are the largest and most influential teach-ins in linguistics, and have been crucial in nourishing new developments in the field. They are held every two years, attracting a world-wide gathering of researchers and students. This institute has been marked by growing interest in intersubjective cognition as a central component in language, as well as a strong emphasis on languages of the South-Western Pacific. This year Nick Evans is its External Deputy Director. Three members of the Department are teaching courses there: Malcolm Ross, honoured as the Collitz Professor, is teaching a six-week course on Austronesian and Papuan Historical Linguistics, Mark Donohue is teaching a three-week course on the 'Phonological Typology of Papuan languages', and Nick Evans is teaching a six-week course on 'Grammar and Social Cognition'. Malcolm is additionally giving a plenary lecture on 'Understanding the history of Oceanic possessive constructions'. A substantial number of students from the department are taking courses at the Institute: Tom Honeyman, Sebastien Lecrampe, Yusuf Sawaki, Antoinette Schapper, and future PhD student Niko Kobepa.

Tom and Antoinette, together with Rachel Hendery and Lila San Roque, also presented a poster on 'A grammar's anatomy' at the Association for Linguistic Typology conference held during the Institute, and Nick Evans presented a paper on 'Some problems in the typology of quotation: a canonical approach'.

Visiting Oxford University

Wayan Arka visited Oxford University 28 June-12 July 2009, working with Professor Mary Dalrymple for his ARC-funded Indonesian ParGram (Parallel Grammar) project. Indonesian ParGram is a three-year project aimed at developing a large-scale electronic grammar and corpus for Indonesian. It is a collaborative project, in which Mary is the PI (Partner Investigator). During his stay at Oxford, Wayan worked with Mary to improve the morphological analyser for the Indonesian grammar. He also worked with Suriel Mofu for the testsuites needed for the grammar development.

A new member

On Thursday, 23 July, Owen Ryan Mailhammer was born. He and his mum, Vanessa, are doing fine. Whether Owen will join the department is not yet clear, as it is a bit too early at this stage to say whether he'll follow his dad on the path of linguistics!

Visitors

Johanna Pätzold, from the University of Munich Germany, visited the department for six weeks (June-July 2009). The following is how she describes what she is doing: 'At the moment, I am writing my Master's thesis in the field of English linguistics on Aboriginal English. As a visitor at the department, I have spent the past six weeks here structuring my ideas and developing an argumentative strategy. In my thesis paper, I intend to give a description of Aboriginal English, summarizing its characteristic features as described in the literature. I try to verify these features by analysing recordings of Bill Neidjie made by Robert Handelsmann in the 1990s. I also attempt to classify Aboriginal English from the viewpoint of contact linguistics and language variation theories. I'd like to thank everybody at the department for your generous help and the inspiring atmosphere!'

July 2009

Keynote Speaker

Wayan was invited as a keynote speaker at the ALL4 (Austronesian Languages and Linguistics) conference at SOAS, London, 17-18 June 2009. His talk entitled 'PIVOT selection and its related puzzles in Indonesian' highlighted certain perennial and intriguing issues in Indonesian syntax not satisfactorily accounted for before. He presented fresh data, which was overlooked in previous studies, and discussed the puzzling mystery in the distribution of the gapping (PIV) and resumptive pronoun (-nya) strategies in relative clauses in Indonesian. After the ALL4 conference, Wayan attended the ELDP panel meeting (19-20 June), also held at SOAS.

11-ICAL

The Department of Linguistics, RSPAS, was well represented at the 11-ICAL (International conference on Austronesian languages) in Aussois, France, 22-25 June 2009. Andy Pawley, Malcolm Ross, Wayan Arka, Alex Francois, Antoinette Schapper, Piers Kelly and Jason Kwok L. Lee were there presenting their papers at the conference. Andy organised the panel on Dictionary making in Austronesian Linguistics and presented his paper entitled 'On the treatment of plant and animal names in bilingual dictionary'. Malcolm presented his update on 'Proto Austronesian verbal morphology: an appraisal'. Wayan presented two papers ('Extreme analyticity and complexity in argument realisations' & 'Attrition of voice morphology and fronted questions in the Austronesian languages of Nusa Tenggara'), Antoinette also presented two papers ( 'Isolating Timor: analyticity, contact and linguistic history', 'Possession in Kemak'). Jason presented 'the core status of arguments in Mandar'. Mark Donohue's paper ('Isolating?') was presented by Antoinette.

Winning the bid for 12-ICAL

Wayan and David (Gil) won the bid to host the 12-ICAL (International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics), which will be held in Bali, 2-6 July 2012. It will be co-hosted by the ANU, Udayana University and the MPI.

Pacific Linguistics

Pacific Linguistics had a small book display at the 11-ICAL. Thanks must go to Andy, Jason, Antoinette, and Piers who were willing to take copies of PL books with them for the display at Aussois. All of the copies were sold out. We also managed to have a good number of orders, especially for Bob Blust's book Austronesian languages. Andy and Sander Adelaar presented Bob with his festschrift. Just before the presentation, Andy also had an 'informal launch' of Bob's Austronesian languages book.

Grant

An organising committee including three members of the Department (Nick Evans, Wayan Arka and Yusuf Sawaki) have recently received a grant of 30,000 Euro from the Australia-Netherlands Research Collaboration scheme, to organise a conference in Manokwari, West Papua, next February, on the theme: 'Melanesian languages on the edge of Asia: past, present and future'. This conference will be hosted by the Universitas Negeri Papua, in Manokwari. Other members of the organising committee are Marian Klamer (Leiden University) and David Gil (Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology). This major conference is part of the Department's push to intensify the study of Papuan languages across the whole Melanesian region, but also to specifically strengthen ties with the growing number of scholars in Eastern Indonesia interested in documenting the languages of that region.

Fieldwork

Nick Evans has just returned from a field-trip to Arnhem Land with Linda Barwick (PARADISEC, U. Sydney), continuing their project on endangered song languages of Western Arnhem Land. The trip focused on working with the ever-dwindling number of Dalabon speakers to document their rich song tradition, including transcribing and translating songs in a number of genres (Bongolinj-Bongolinj, Yayak) and collecting stories about the processes of composition, performance and transmission of music.

June 2009

Fieldwork

• From May 1st to May 9th Nick Evans was on Bentinck Island, Queensland working with Kayardild speakers and with UQ Archaeologists Sean Ulm and Daniel Rosendahl on an ARC-funded project reconstructing the prehistory of the Wellesley Islands. One of the goals is to get occupation dates for when Kayardild speakers arrived in the South Wellesleys, so as to pin firm dates to the family tree of Tangkic languages. The week threw up a number of promising archaeological sites and afforded a chance to check out ethnographic and material-culture vocabulary with the ever-dwindling number of Kayardild speakers, now down to half a dozen. On his way back Nick took the opportunity to work in Brisbane for a day with Andrea Schalley and Alex Borkowski (Griffith) on his other ARC project on Grammar and Social Cognition, building the ontology of cross-linguistic psychosocial categories for the project.
• Aung Si just returned to Canberra after doing fieldwork to India. He carried out his fieldwork in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India over five months, to collect data on the language and traditional ecological knowledge of the Solega tribals who live around the hill forests. The Solega used to hunt and practice shifting cultivation in that region until the 1970s, when much of their ancestral lands were converted into a wildlife sanctuary by the Indian government. The people were forced to relocate to permanent settlements, and the traditional practice of lighting low-intensity leaf-litter fires to clear new farmland was also banned. As a result, the Solega are now a society in flux, one in which many young people know little of the old ways, and are increasingly likely to speak the closely related, but more prestigious, state language, Kannada. Large parts of the wildlife sanctuary have been invaded by the woody weed Lantana, which incidentally, is considered a 'weed of national significance' in Australia. The Solega blame the suppression of leaf-litter fires for the current state of the forest, and say that the introduction of the weed has had a severe negative impact on the local diversity of plants and animals.
• Stef Spronck returned to the department after having spent seven months at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguisitcs in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. During that time he attended a number of conferences among which the European Australianist Workshop in Manchester, UK, a conference on Verb Typology in Ghent, Belgium, the Deutsche Geselschaft für Sprachwisseschaft Jahrestagung in Osnabrück, Germany and a workshop on Classification Systems in Wassenaar, The Netherlands. He also presented a paper about the grammatical encoding of speaker evaluations in reported speech constructions as part of the Language and Social Cognition project at the Radboud University, Nijmegen and the MPI Nijmegen. He is currently preparing for a fieldwork trip to the Kimberley, WA.

Workshop

The Grammar and Social Cognition project held its second annual workshop at Kioloa from 15-17 May, attended by fifteen participants from the ANU, University of Melbourne and Griffith. ANU participants included Chief Investigators Nick Evans and Alan Rumsey, postdoc Lila San Roque, and PhD students Stef Spronck, Tom Honeyman, Aung Si, Yusuf Sawaki and Annelise Kuhle. Participants at the workshop presented the first trial findings from a new story-card compilation task they have been developing to elicit spontaneous but cross-linguistically comparable material across a range of genres (picture descriptions, discussions, narrative), with material gathered for the Papuan languages Duna and Ku Waru, the Australian language Iwaidja, as well as Bulgarian and Japanese. CI Andrea Schalley and Alex Borkowski (Griffith) demonstrated the developing ontology, and the three Melbourne participants (CI Bark Kelly, and PhD students Lauren Gawne and Sarah Ciesielski) presented various materials on evidentials and reported speech in Sherpa and other Tibeto-Burman languages.

Visiting Student

The department welcomed exchange student Anneliese Kuhle who will be a guest in the Department over the next year. Anneliese is writing her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin on concepts of reciprocity in language and their relationships to the reciprocity in anthropology and evolutionary biology. This is how she describes herself:

"I, Anneliese Kuhle, am a PhD student from the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) and my PhD topic revolves around different concepts of 'reciprocity'. I ask the question of whether it might be possible to draw on non-linguistic concepts of reciprocity, discussed in such fields as behavioural biology and anthropology, in order to motivate and explain the use of reciprocal constructions in languages around the world. The realization of this project is still in its early stages and I am currently beginning to focus on some Australian languages – hence my particular interest in coming to the RSPAS – in which to take a closer look at the semantics of reciprocals and its relation to anthropological conceptions of reciprocity."

Book Launch

Nick Evans launched his crossover book 'Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What they have to tell us' at Alcaston Galleries, Fitzroy, Melbourne, on May 20th at a lively occasion attended by nearly a hundred people. The book was introduced by Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics at Monash. The launching of the book has attracted a flurry of media interest with half a dozen radio interviews in two days.

Seminars, Conferences

• Robert Mailhammer was invited to give a talk at the University of Queensland 22 June 2009. The title of his talk was "Coercion - the Trojan horse of pragmatics".
• Mark Donohue is representing the linguistics department at two conferences in the United States, the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and (more unusually) the Workshop on American Indigenous Languages at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The linguistics department at ANU co-hosted the AFLA conference in Australia last year, a conference that attracts the top theoreticians working on Austronesian languages, the family that covers most of the countries of the Pacific and Island Southeast Asia. At the WAIL meeting in Santa Barbara Mark will be discussing the results of a pilot study into inheritance, diffusion, and areal dispersal of linguistic features. This work, representing joint research with Bronwen Whiting (also of ANU) is the first attempt to measure the differences between ancient and recent provenances for linguistic features. The work reported on in Santa Barbara examines 140 languages in 7 culture areas along the west of the North American continent. Following feedback on this initial study the study will move to the Southwest Pacific, in collaboration with geographers and anthropologists at ANU and elsewhere, seeking to understand the patterns present in a much larger (2000 language sample) database representing Asia and the Pacific.

May 2009

New Book: Dying words

Nick's crossover book, Dying Words: endangered languages and what they have to tell us has appeared with Wiley Blackwell (excerpts can be read on http://au.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0631233059.html). This book will be launched in Melbourne next month on May 20th at Alcaston Galleries, Fitzroy, with a Canberra launch also planned for mid-year. On his way back from Cairns Nick spent a day working with Griffith colleague Andrea Schalley on designing the ontology for grammatical categories dealing with social cognition, following on the heels of his presentation of this project to the Joint Anthropology seminar last month (March 25th). From May 1st – May 10th he will be on fieldwork on Bentinck Island, Queensland, with archaeologists Sean Ulm and Daniel Rosendahl (UQ) as part of their joint ARC project on the prehistory of the Wellesley Islands.

The induction for Linguistics

The induction days for Linguistics were held on Friday 3 April (across CAP and CASS) and on Monday 6 April 2009 (for RSPAS). The first induction day took place in Coombs, with activities including information about Graduate Field of Linguistics, different seminars and research group meetings (Linguistics, Languages and Cultures Seminar Series, Centre of Research on Language Change Seminars, CRLC Historical Linguistics Reading Group, Grammar Writing Group, Japan Centre Seminar Series, School of Language Studies Monday Seminar series, Discourse Analysis Group (DAG), Research Roundtable, Social Cognition Reading Group, Language Acquisition and Teaching Seminar (LAT), NSM, Semantic Workshops, Informal Field Linguistics Seminars Linguistics talk @ ANU, and RSPAS Linguistics Seminars), important web sites, talks by a Recent PhD Graduate her experience, talked by Prof Nick Evans. The first induction day was closed off by an invited talk by Prof Joe Lo Bianco (University of Melbourne) in McDonald Room, Menzies Library, followed by a drink and dinner in the city.

The induction day on Monday 6 April was a full day with seminars showing the richness of research at the department. The papers were presented by students and staff members. The topics of the papers include language descriptions and language documentation, historical linguistics, typology and computational implementation in linguistics.

On Sabbatical leave

John Bowden is on Sabbatical now (Mid April-December 2009). He will be in the field working on his Helong project (funded by the Hans-Rausing ELDP grant). He will spend most of his time in Indonesia, based at the ATMA Jaya University in Jakarta. During his sabbatical, he also plans to write up a book on language policy and planning in East Timor and finish off papers and a book that he is editing.

Seminars and conferences

• Robert Mailhammer went to the 15th Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference, which was held in conjunction with the 8th Conference of the Foreign Language Studies and the 6th Conference on the Study of the History of the English Language in Banff from 30 April until 3 May 2009. Rob was invited to give a talk in a Workshop entitled "Current topics in Germanic etymology" and the title of his talk was "Germanic etymology from a Non-Indo-European perspective: cumulative evidence"
• Nick Evans delivered an invited paper in Cairns on April 17th at the inaugural conference of the Language and Cultural Research Group, The Cairns Institute, James Cook University on the topic of 'What we bury when last speakers die: the languages of the Wellesley Islands and what they can tell'.
• There were different seminars and research groups meetings at the department last April. The following people gave talks at the regular Friday seminars: Alex Francois (CNRS) giving a talk on Lexical divergence and structural parallelism across the languages of north Vanuatu: two pressures in conflict on April 17th, and Paul Sidwell on The Austroasiatic Central Riverine Hypothesis on April 24th. Chikako Senge delivered a talk on Problems of Wanyjirra syntax, on April 24th, at the Informal Field Linguistics Seminars series. There were also meetings by the GWG (Grammar-Writing Group) on every Monday (11.00-12.30), with topic 'Grammatical relations'.

Pacific Linguistics: the 600th book release

The first 2009 new release from Pacific Linguistics (PL) is McGregor and Rumsey's book entitled Worrorran revisited: the case for genetic relations among languages of the Northern Kimberley region of Western Australia. It is also the 600th book published by PL since its establishment in 1963. PL specialises in linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, atlases, and other materials concerned with languages of the Pacific, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Southeast Asia and minority languages of South and East Asia. The focus is on little known and endangered languages in the Asia Pacific region. More information about PL and other books published by PL can be viewed at http://pacling.anu.edu.au/.

Fieldwork

• Lila San Roque has returned from a trip to the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Lila spent a few days at Ukarumpa in the Eastern Highlands Province meeting with members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (PNG) to discuss the use of local languages in education and to have a look at the collection of rare manuscript material at the SIL library. She then spent some weeks at Lake Kopiago in Southern Highlands Province working with Petros Kilapa and his family to collect data on their language, Duna. Material gathered on this trip will be used to examine the encoding of social cognition in grammar, looking in particular at how interlocuters make reference to each other's knowledge in conversation.
• Chikako Senge has now left for Halls Creek on the first fieldtrip of her doctorate. She will be working there with speakers of the endangered Wanyjirra language.

April 2009

Winning the NEH Award

Congratulations are extended to Dr. Paul Sidwell who has won the National Endowment for the Humanities (Division of Preservation and Access) award. The two-year (2009-1011) grant worth US$349,540 is awarded to the Centre for Research in Computational Linguistics (CRCL, Bangkok) for his "Mon-Khmer Languages Project". Paul is a visiting Research Fellow at the department of Linguistics at the ANU, a Principal Investigator and Director of Mon-Khmer Projects for CRCL. The grant facilitates years 3-4 of the project which will deliver:

• the Mon-Khmer languages database makes all language reference materials, including phonetic transcription, glosses, and citations, freely available. We have already compiled datasets that provide touchstones for each of the dozen major Mon-Khmer branch divisions. We seek continuing funds to provide at least one lexical dataset for all of the more than thirty MK sub-branches.
• the Mon-Khmer etymological dictionary is a hierarchical reference that puts the data in historical context. We have built its backbone by extracting and tagging reconstructed etyma from the Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary (Shorto 2006). We now seek funds to build the 'ribs' – to extend the backbone by adding datasets for six established branch/sub-branch reconstructions.
• the Mon-Khmer languages website supports collaborative Mon-Khmer language research and disseminates database and dictionary data. We seek funds to build tools needed to develop new knowledge as we tackle the remaining branch-level reconstructions. We will also create innovative teaching screencasts that use our tools to provide practical training in historical linguistics.

Winning Posdoc Fellowship

Departmental alumnus and visiting fellow Bethwyn Evans has been offered a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig to work on contact between Austronesian and non-Austronesian languages; before taking that up, she will spend two months as a visiting fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University of Bergen.

New Students

Sébastien Lacrampe joined RSPAS in March 2009 as a PhD student. He works on Lelepa, an oceanic language of central Vanuatu spoken by around 500 speakers. He spent the past two years working on this language and obtained a Masters degree from the University of the South Pacific. The thesis he wrote as part of the MA investigates the expression of possession in Lelepa and constitutes the first analysis of any grammatical aspect of this language.

Sébastien arrived in Vanuatu in 2001 as a qualified French teacher and got stuck into linguistics as a result of extensive travelling in this archipelago, where a hundred and-more languages are spoken. For his PhD, he intends to keep on working on Lelepa by continuing documentation work and writing a descriptive grammar.

Yusuf Sawaki joined RSPAS as a PhD student in October 2008, but just arrived in ANU campus on the 26th of March 2009. He works on Wooi, an Austronesian language of Yapen Island, West Papua, Indonesia spoken by around 1,800 speakers. Many years working on the Central Yali language, a Papuan language of Dani family in the Central Highlands of New Guinea, but decided to work on Wooi last year as a part of language documentation project funded by Volkswagen Foundation to document Wooi and his PhD sponshored by Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. Writing a descriptive grammar of Wooi is the main focus of his PhD.

Master Class & Workshops

Tony Woodbury, who through February was in the department on the Visiting Academics Scheme and gave a very successful Master Class on Speech Play and Verbal Art, as well as a public lecture on the Chatino Language Documentation program in Mexico, has returned to the University of Texas, Austin, after an extremely stimulating visit.

The annual workshop on Australian Languages was held in Kioloa from 20-22 March. Nick Evans and Chikako Senge represented the department, and Nick Evans presented a paper on the linguistics and archaeology of the Wellesley Islands, Gulf of Carpentaria along with colleagues Ruth Singer (Melbourne), Michael Dunn (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen), and Sean Ulm, Paul Memmott and Dan Rosendahl (U. Queensland).

Fieldwork

Nick Evans recently returned from fieldwork on Croker Island, N.T., where he was gathering data on the Iwaidja language, and from a visit to Japan. There he presented a paper on Insubordination and the grammaticalisation of interactive presuppositions at a symposium at the Osaka Museum of Ethnography on 'Methodologies in determining morphosyntactic change', as well as a talk on 'Why biologists should care about linguistic diversity' at a special meeting on linguistic, cultural and biodiversity held at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto.

A course on Melanesian Pidgins

Ruth Spriggs, a visiting fellow in the department, began teaching a new undergraduate course on Melanesian Pidgins, to be offered through first semester as part of the Pacific Studies program.

Visiting Fellow

Dr Robert Mailhammer has started on a Feodor-Lynen postoctoral grant, working on Amurdak, an Australian language from Northern Arnhem Land. Before coming to ANU he worked at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, the University of Munich and as well as the University of Melbourne. Rob's main research interests are Australian languages and descriptive linguistics as well as language change and language variation, particularly in the Germanic languages, morphology, phonology and language acquisition.

March 2009

Round Table

Professor Darrell Tyron (Linguistics, RSPAS) is the organiser of the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific-Austrian Embassy Round Table: "Europe and the Pacific: Changed Perceptions and New Strategies". The Round Table was held in Room 1.04, Coombs Extension Building, Friday 20 February. The Round Table, opened by the Acting Dean of the College, Prof Hugh White, was a huge success, attended by ten ambassadors from Europe and the Pacific, representatives of the Australian government and of course the ANU. It is hoped that this event will become an annual one, held in Vienna and Canberra in alternating years.

Master Class and Seminars

Professor Tony Woodbury (U Texas, Austin) visited the department in February 2009, supported by ANU's Visiting International Academics scheme. Tony has carried out fieldwork on Yup'ik Eskimo and on Chatino (Mexico), writing some seminal papers on the documentation of verbal art in minority speech communities, as well as on other topics including evidentiality, tonal analysis and language documentation more generally. As part of his visit he taught a master class on Language and Verbal Art, as an intensive course during the week Feb 9-13th. The full information about this master class is available on our seminars page, and on this page.

Starting Fellowship

Dr Alexandre François (Lacito-CNRS, France) arrived early January 2009 in Canberra with his family to start his fellowship at the ANU. Alex has received an international mobility grant from CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) for a period of two years, starting February 2009. During this period, he will be a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Linguistics, RSPAS (ANU). While pursuing his studies on the Oceanic languages of north Vanuatu (Banks and Torres islands), he will focus these two years on the description and historical study of the three little-known languages spoken on the island of Vanikoro (Temotu province, Solomon Islands), two of which are almost extinct.

Joining the ANU

Mark Donohue joined the Department of Linguistics at RSPAS at the beginning of January. He is a specialist in Papuan languages, the non-Austronesian languages of the Melanesian region, but has also worked in Austronesian languages from Indonesia (Sulawesi, Nusa Tenggara, Irian Jaya). His immediate plans at the ANU are to continue explorations in the grammars of Papuan languages of the highlands (Damal) and north coast (Skou, One) in New Guinea; continue joint work leading to a better understanding of the historical relations of the western Papuan languages of the Timor area; develop work, with Beth Evans, on the diffusion of non-Austronesian vocabulary items east of New Guinea; and pursue inter-disciplinary work with archaeologists, botanists and geneticists that aims to unravel the histories of the peoples of the Sahul region and surrounds. In an ideal world Mark is perhaps most drawn to morphosyntax, but finds phonology endlessly distracting, as well as historical linguistics. The potential of quantified areal typology to be applied to the study of regional macrohistories, through the detection and classification of substrate features, is his current hobby horse, one that he hopes to continue for a while to come.

Summer Research Scholar

Sophia Jarlov Wallingford (from Wellington, New Zealand) was at the department for two months (December 2008-January 2009) on a Summer Research Scholarship. She recently completed her Bachelor of Arts majoring in Linguistics and Japanese. She is now back to Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, to study for a BA(Hons) in Linguistics in 2009. She has a strong interest in natural Sign Languages, and the focus of her honours thesis will be on an aspect of New Zealand Sign Language. While at the department she was investigating gestures in video recordings from the Waima'a language project, supervised by John Bowden, and also participated in the grammar-writing group sessions.

Invited Talk

Nick Evans delivered an invited talk in early January at the workshop 'Creating Infrastructure for Canonical Typology': 'Rare but useful: the canons 'direct' and 'indirect' in reported speech typology' and went on to visit the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen to work on a range of projects, most crucially working with Partner Investigators Steve Levinson and Nick Enfield on the ARC-funded project 'Language and Social Cognition: the design resources of grammatical diversity'.

The 2009 Stephen Wurm Prize

Congratulations are extended to Lila San Roque, who has won the 2009 Stephen Wurm prize for the best PhD thesis submitted in 2008. Her thesis title is 'An introduction to Duna grammar'. It describes simple sentence structures in Duna (Southern Highlands Province, PNG), with a particular focus on bound morphemes that encode the semantic domain of epistemic assessment. Lila submitted her PhD thesis in September 2008. Two examiners praised her thesis and recommended a prize for its quality. A generous bequest by Stephen Wurm (the first HOD of the department of Linguistics, RSPAS) has allowed the department to establish a scholarship scheme for PhD study in the department, and also a prize for the best PhD thesis submitted in the preceding year. Lila is the second person who won the prize. New PhD students

There are at least three new PhD students at the department this semester: Sebastien LeCrampe, Jusuf Sawaki and Meladel Mistica. Sebastien is going to continue working on a language of Vanuatu. Jusuf is going to work Woi, an Austronesian language of West Papua. Meladel is working on Treebank and computational linguistic resources for Indonesian, as part of the ARC-funded Indonesian Parallel Grammar (ParGram) project. Meladel is enrolled at Linguistics, CASS (College of Arts and Social Sciences). However, she has her office at Linguistics, RSPAS, CAP (College of Asian and Pacific) in Coombs, working closely with Wayan Arka.