News Archive: 2008

December 2008

Winning a fellowship

Congratulations are extended to Michinori Shimoji, who has got a job (to start in December 2008) as a Research Fellow at ILCAA (Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. This is a three-year contract job for him, working on endangered language descriptions. Michinori, said that he managed to win the competitive job because of his training at the ANU under supervision of Professors Andy Pawley and Malcolm Ross. Michinori went back to Japan in October and plamled to submit his PhD thesis from Japan early December 2008.

Shortlisted candidates: seminars and interviews:

The big event last month at the department was the selection process for the new position of Research Fellow in linguistics. There were three shortlisted candidates (Mark Donohue, Birgit Hellwig, and Bethwyn Evans). They had to give seminars, meet the student representatives and attend the interviews. The seminars for the candidates on November 10th were well attended. Mark Donohue talked about 'Nasals, syllables, and typology and Damal'; Birgit talked about 'Semantic Fieldwork: Investigating verb classes', and Beth presented 'Reanalysis: recovering syntactic and semantic causes'. After the seminar, a dinner was organized in Coombs for the candidates to meet staff members, students and other linguists around the campus. The student Liaison Committee, chaired by Doug Marmion, arranged students' meetings with the candidates in the morning, November 11th. The interviews took place in the afternoon on November 11th. The outcome of the selection will be officially announced soon.

Summer Research Scholar

Sophia Jarlov Wallingford (from Wellington, New Zealand) is at the department for two months on a Summer Research Scholarship. She recently completed her Bachelor of Arts majoring in Linguistics and Japanese, and will return 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 will be investigating gestures in video recordings from the Waima'a language project, supervised by John Bowden.

Fieldwork

Tom Honeyman has returned from a short 3 month fieldwork trip in Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea. This is his second trip to the area, and the situation is quite different from his previous trip in 2005/2006. A large logging company now has a contract on Sandaun province until 2012, which made it significantly easier to move around as some areas have roads for the first time, but difficult in other ways. Tom is working on a description of the language Fas, with a particular focus on reported speech and thought.

November 2008

PhD thesis submitted

Congratulations are also extended to Carol Priestley, who has submitted her PhD thesis. Carol's thesis is a grammar of Koromu, a Papuan language spoken in PNG. A small celebration party was organized for her on Wednesday afternoon, 23^rd of October in Coombs Building.

Fieldwork

Nick Evans has just returned from a one-month scoping trip to the Trans-Fly area Southern New Guinea, in the Morehead region on the PNG side and the Merauke/Wasur region on the Indonesian/Papua province side. It took him for an initial 12 day fieldwork stint to the remote village of Bimadeben, whose 400 occupants speak the hitherto unstudied Nen language, the easternmost member of a family of around 20 languages (none yet described) that stretch across the very north-Australian feeling landscape of eucalyptus and melaleuca savannahs and monsoon vine forests for about 150 km reaching over into Indonesian Papua. The language turns out to be fascinating and the village a most welcoming and interesting place, confirming his plans to make this a major field commitment for a full study of the language over the years to come.

He was then met by old ethnoecologist friend Jeremy Russell-Smith, Port Moresby WWF rep Biatus Bito (a forester by training) and travelled out to Morehead Station, then down the Mae Kussa river and along the coast by small dinghy to Daru, thence back to Port Moresby, up to Vanimo, by PMV to the border at Wutung, walking across the only official land border crossing between the two countries and taking a taxi to Jayapura, then by plane to Merauke and vehicle - with the logistical assistance of WWF and Wasur National Park representatives – to some remote villages in the upper reaches of the Maro river where people speak Yey, this time the westernmost language of the same family Nen belongs to, recording some of that and discussing plans for future linguistic research there as well.

The purpose of our joint expedition with WWF (supported by Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service though its part of a Trinational Wetlands Agreement) is to plan out future research in the region that will look at traditional knowledge of the monsoon forest and its management (through swidden agriculture, sago palm use etc.) – research that will combine the perspectives of linguistics and western biology to fathom traditional ecological knowledge.

The whole 5-day odyssey described above is the only way of making what would have been, before the present political borders were enforced, a simple 50 km walk along forest tracks. The contrasts between life on the two sides of the border are perhaps the starkest Nick has ever seen between two geographical neighbours, and the lack of mutual engagement between the countries is equally striking (no airline flights, available currency exchanges in capitals, news, etc.), contrasting with the network of ties of marriage and ceremonial exchange that unite the Melanesian peoples on either side of the border. Against this backdrop Nick and Wayan Arka are planning a study of languages of the region (which we will submit as an ARC Discovery proposal). Somehow or other we hope to carry out in a way that will bring greater collaboration and exchange between the two sides – certainly the people on the ground during this scoping trip were extremely supportive of the idea.

Party

A small farewell party was organized for Michinori Shimoji in the Coombs tea room on Thursday afternoon 16th of October 2008. Michi is now in the final year of his PhD candidature. He is working on a reference grammar ofIrabu, a Ryukyuan language of the Japonic family. He went back home to Japan for financial reasons, and plans to submit his thesis from Japan early next year.

September 2008

Morning tea together

In addition to regular morning tea and afternoon tea at the tea room, a new tradition has been initiated by Nick Evans: a Departmental morning tea once a month. The first one was held on Monday 8th September, at the Anthropology corner in Coombs Building. It was attended by students, academic staff members, PL staff and emeritus professors. This is a good monthly social event for people to get together, and share news and other things currently going on at the department.

Celebrations

Congratulations are extended to Francisca Handoko, who has won the 2008 Stephen Wurm prize for the best PhD thesis submitted in 2007. Francisca worked on Language Choice among Totok Chinese speakers in Surabaya, investigating some spectacularly multilingual inter-generational code-switching. A small party to celebrate this was organised on Friday 19th of September, before she gave a talk at the regular Friday seminar. The party was also to honour the late Stephen and Helen Wurm, the first HOD of the department of Linguistics, RSPAS. A generous bequest by Stephen Wurm 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. Francisca is the first person who won the prize, and Stef Spronck is the first student who won the Wurm scholarship. Congratulations are also extended to Lila San Roque. She submitted her PhD thesis on Friday afternoon, 26th of September. 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. This happy occasion was celebrated with a small party, held at the courtyard of the Coombs building. The party attended by students, staff members, and members of Lila's PhD supervisory committee.

Fieldwork trips

Stef Spronck has made a short fieldtrip to Western Australia (6 August - 5 September). He travelled to Derby and did exploratory research in the Aboriginal community of Mowanjum. For his PhD project, he is working on reported speech and thought in Ngarinyin. His PhD project is part of the ARC-funded research project on social cognition and language, led by Nick Evans. Stef will attempt to give an account of constructions conveying knowledge from 'other minds', current speaker attitudes towards these messages and related grammatical categories. The main data will come from earlier recordings/transcripts of Ngarinyin texts made over the past decades and elicitation experiments particularly focussing on reported speech. During the month-long trip in August Stef worked with a number of Ngarinyin speakers and asked for their participation in more extensive fieldwork, which he will carry out during a 6-month stay in the Kimberley mid next year.

Nick Evans is away on his one-month fieldwork trip to PNG and Indonesia's West Papua. He will be back late in October.

July-August 2008

Presentations

Nick Evans presented a paper on song traditions of the Dalabon people of Western Arnhem Land, along with his collaborators Allan Marett, Linda Barwick and Murray Garde, at a symposium organised at the 7th National Indigenous Music and Dance Symposium at Charles Darwin University, as part of the festival, Saturday 16 August 2008.

New Series

A new regular group has been started, for those involved in writing reference grammars of little known languages (see blog on http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/elac/). It is convened by Nick Evans, Wayan Arka and John Bowden, and meets on Mondays at 11.00. Anyone interested in attending will be welcome - just contact one of the convenors.

Grammar-writing session is just one of the regular events run by the department. Other regular events are the Friday seminars, Informal Field Linguistics seminars, and Linguistics, Language and Cultures seminars (jointly run linguists in CAP and CASS). A full program can be viewed at http://rspas.anu.edu.au/linguistics/seminars.php.

SHLP Conference

The Department of Linguistics, RSPAS, ANU hosted the Inaugural Conference of the SHLP (Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific) on 1st-2nd August 2008. The conference organisers (William B. McGregor, Hilary Carey, and David Moore) were very pleased with the success of the conference. It was well attended (by over 30 people during the day). The papers covered a wide range of topics in linguistic historiography, revealing that this is an area of burgeoning interest. The conference was followed by a book launch. The book is a new collection of papers Encountering Aboriginal Languages: Studies in the history of Australian linguistics edited by William B. McGregor and published by Pacific Linguistics. In his launch of the book, Nick Evans noted "a history of neglect and a neglect to history" in work on Indigenous languages in Australia (see http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/elac/2008/08/a_history_of_neglect_and_a_neg_1.html for more). Hopefully, this edited volume which represents the first book-length study of the history of research on Australian Aboriginal languages, spanning the period from first settlement to the present day, would fill in some of the gaps.

Winning CNRS Grant

Dr Alexandre François (Lacito-CNRS, France) 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.

Visitors

Nick Enfield (from the MPI Nijmegen) visited the department (20-22 August) and gave three presentations (at the Social Cognition group meeting, Informal Field Linguistics seminar and the regular RSPAS Friday seminar. Nick Enfield's research is on the intersection of language, cognition, social interaction, and culture. His visit is part of an on-going collaborative (ARC-funded) research project with Nick Evans (Linguistics RSPAS) and Alan Rumsey (Anthropology, RSPAS) on Grammar and Social Cognition. The project examines the way diverse grammars crystallise human reasoning about social reality.

The department was pleased to have Mary Dalrymple (Oxford University) and Miriam Butt (University of Konstanz) as visiting fellows at the department in July 2008 and early August 2008. They were visiting the ANU team (I Wayan Arka and Avery Andrews) to help them work on the morphological analyser and computational grammar development for the Indonesian ParGram (Parallel Grammar) Project. The Indonesian ParGram Project, funded by the ARC Discovery grant, is a collaborative project involving the ANU, Sydney University, Oxford University, and the University of Indonesia Jakarta. Both Mary and Miriam have been involved in the development of the LFG-based computational grammars of English and other languages for over 15 years. Their experience has been of great advantage for the Indonesian ParGram Project. The Indonesian ParGram has made significant progress in the first year, ahead of the schedule in terms of basic constructions covered in the grammar, development of tokeniser and morphological analyser.

Retirement Party

A retirement party was organised to thank Darrell Tyron and Malcolm Ross for their long services and significant contributions to the department on Friday 29th August, lunch time, in the tea room, Coombs. The party was attended by academic and administrative staff members of the department and the DSE, students, and other invited guests. Featuring the party were the slide shows highlighting Darrell's and Malcolm's personal and academic milestones, and speeches by Andy Pawley, Nick Evans, Darrell and Malcolm, and a few words from Jim Fox and Harold Koch.

New student

Chikako Senge (from Japan) is starting her PhD at the department this semester. Before coming to the ANU, she worked on Oceanic languages (especially languages of Vanuatu) for her Master degree in Japan. She then did a Postgraduate Diploma in linguistics at the University of Melbourne, working on Wanyjirra (a language spoken in the east Kimberley area, Western Australia) using the language data collected and transcribed by Professor Tasaku Tsunoda from University of Tokyo. She submitted a thesis "A Sketch Grammar of Wanyjirra" to the University of Melbourne in June, 2008. She will keep working on this language for her PhD project (supervised by Nick Evans). The aim is to have a more detailed description of this language, including the dialectal relationship between Wanyjirra and surrounding languages.

Fieldwork trips

All staff members were away on different occasions in May-June. Nick Evans was in Europe visiting MPI and giving a course on language documentation (May to late June), and went to the field in the Arnhem land (9th -29th July 2008). Wayan Arka was in Flores Indonesia for his Voice Project (funded an NSF grant). John Bowden was Kupang, West Timor, Indonesia (mid June-early July) for his ELDP Helong project.