Program

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

4:00pm - 5:30pm

Keynote address
Sheldon P. Harrison, University of Western Australia
"Using linguistic evidence in relative text dating: case studies from the debate on dating the Biblical Hebrew corpus"

5:30pm

Book Launch, sponsored by the CRLC, of:

Bowern, Claire & Harold Koch (eds.) 2004. Australian Languages: classification and the comparative method. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Evans, Nicholas (eds.) 2003. The Non-Pama-Nyungan languages of Northern Australia: comparative studies of the continent's most linguistically complex region. (Studies on Language Change) Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

to be launched by Associate Professor Alan Dench, Univeristy of Western Australia

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

11:15am - 12:30pm

Luisa Miceli and Bethwyn Evans, Australian National University
"Introduction"

Anthony Naro, Federal University, Rio de Janeiro
"Genetic versus Contact Relationships: the Origins of Brazilian Portuguese"

Ghil'ad Zuckermann, University of Cambridge
"The genetics of the Israeli language: revival, relexification or hybridization?"

2:00pm - 3:30pm

Harold Koch, Australian National University
"Top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to linguistic reconstruction and classification"

Andrew Pawley, Australian National University
"Experiments in the top-down and bottom-up reconstruction in the Trans New Guinea family"

Ian Green, University of Tasmania
"Morphological evidence for genetic relatedness: a Southern Daly perspective"

4:00pm - 5:30pm

Erich Round, University of Melbourne
"Against a simplistic frequency-based approach: The role of structure in function word lenition"

Anthony Grant, Edge Hill (University of Lancaster)
"Upstreaming Swadesh: making the most of qualitative lexicostatistics"

DISCUSSION

Thursday, July 15, 2004

9:00am - 10:30am

Bethwyn Evans, Australian National University
"Recovering linguistic prehistory in the Solomon Islands: the use of complementary methods"

Luisa Miceli, Australian National University
"What does "genetic relationship" mean?"

Matthew Toulmin, Australian National University
"From linguistic to socio-linguistic reconstruction: a study of the 'Kamata' or 'Rajbanshi' lects of north Bengal"

11:00am - 12:30pm

Dianne Jonas, Yale University
"The loss of verb raising: A case study in syntactic variation and change"

Ritsuko Kikusawa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
"Distinguishing Direct Inheritance from Indirect Inheritance and Drift: a Case of Syntactic Reconstruction in Austronesian Languages"

2:00pm - 3:30pm

Harold Koch and Luise Hercus, Australian National University
"Reconstructing vocabulary: comparative wordlists vs. etymological files"

Paul Sidwell, Australian National University
"Return to an etymological method: explaining typological change in the history of the Chamic languages"

DISCUSSION