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Grants for 2003 John Bowden (A.N.U.) and his Associate
John Hajek (University of Melbourne) were granted A$110,000
over three years on their project: Project Description: Both Austronesian and Papuan languages from eastern East Timor have undergone substantial changes which have presumably resulted from communal bilingualism in both sorts of languages. The project aims to document and explain these changes. Language contact has traditionally been a neglected area in historical linguistics and the East Timor situation will provide valuable material for a general theory of language change. Book length grammars of an Austronesian and a Papuan language, further grammatical sketches, and a number of papers on language contact will be produced as a result of the project. Congratulations to Alice Harris, whose project “Diachronic Morphology in Cross-Linguistic Perspective” (effective August 1, 2002) was awarded funding by the National Science Foundation (U.S.A.), BCS-0215523. Gillian Wigglesworth (University of Melbourne)
& Jane Simpson (University of Sydney) (also involving
Patrick McConvell of AIATSIS/CRLC). This project will involve case studies of three Aboriginal communities designed to address the following questions: RQ1: what kind of language input do indigenous Australian Aboriginal children receive from traditional indigenous languages, Kriol and varieties of English, and from code-switching involving these languages as used by adults and older children? RQ2: what effect does this have on the childrens language acquisition and how the input is reflected in their productive output? RQ3: what are the processes of language shift, maintenance and change which may be hypothesised to result from this multilingual environment, as evidenced by the childrens input and output and the degree to which this reflects transmission of the target languages, the loss of traditional languages, or the emergence of new mixed languages? To address the complexity of these questions, this project brings together people with expertise in three different, but related, fields: Central Australian languages (Simpson, Charola and Moses), first language acquisition (Wigglesworth), and historical change and language maintenance (Simpson). They will collect the data for the study by identifying the kinds of interactions young children are involved in, the language they use at different ages, and the breadth and variety of language the children are hearing. Congratulations Luisa, who has been awarded an Italian Government Grant to be taken up at the University of Pavia in January, 2003. Luisa’s nine month project is to study language contact in a multilingual Alpine valley in Italy. The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada have awarded funding to Mireille Tremblay (Principal Investigator), Monique Dufresne (Co-researcher), and Fernande Dupuis (Co-researcher) for their research project on the evolution of prefixes and particles in French (2001-2004): Préverbes, particules et grammaticalisation: Évolution des systèmes aspectuels dans l’histoire du français. Notre projet porte sur la grammaticalisation des prépositions dans l’histoire du français. L’ancien français dispose de deux systèmes pour modifier la valeur aspectuelle d’un verbe: le système des préfixes et celui des particules (arrière, avant, sus, aval, etc.). Notre projet entend fournir une description exhaustive de ces deux systèmes dans une perspective synchronique et diachronique. Søren Wichmann was awarded a research grant providing full salary for the period March 1, 2002 —February 29th, 2004 from the Carlsberg Foundation in support of the project “The Comparative Phonology of the Mayan Languages in the Light of Recent Epigraphic Research” (ANS-0121/20). Congratulations!
Stephen Morey’s thesis ‘The Tai languages of Assam—a Grammar and Texts’ (Monash University, Melbourne) has been examined and accepted with minor alterations (correction of typographical errors). This thesis is in the form of a printed book and a CD. The CD includes not only the word document of the thesis, but also links to sound files for the language examples (over 500), and links to the texts in the Tai languages from which the language examples have come. Stephen has also been offered a postdoctoral fellowship at the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, which he will take up in mid 2003.
This new project for archiving audiovisual materials on endangered cultures of the Pacific region is a joint initiative between the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney. It was recently successful in securing an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage - Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant to set up the archive. The need for an archive has become more and more pressing in recent times: old recordings deteriorate, and materials originally recorded with now obsolescent equipment are getting harder and harder to even play back. Even cassette tapes that were first recorded in the 1970’s have mostly now reached then end of their useful life—and how many newsletter readers are able to listen to the old wire and wax recordings that are sometimes still lying around? The archive will be a boon for linguistic research in the future, with potential uses for comparative linguistics and also research into processes of language change. A web site for the project, which will include all of the metadata descriptions of archived materials will be based at the A.N.U. Enquiries from people at the A.N.U. who are interested in the new archive can be directed to John Bowden (John.Bowden@anu.edu.au). |
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The following is a list of newly appointed Members and Affiliates to the CRLC during 2002. For a complete list of the current CRLC Members click here. Professor Michael A. Arbib, (profile)
University of Southern California Brain Project (Director) Professor Peter Austin, Foundation Chair in
Linguistics, University of Melbourne Assoc. Prof. Nick Evans, Assocate Professor
and Reader, Department of Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, University
of Melbourne Dr. Anthony Paul Grant, West Yorkshire, England Ms. Susan Love, PhD Student, Linguistics Department,
RSPAS, ANU Dr. Daniel Martín, Lecturer Spanish,
School of Language Studies and International Education, University
of Canberra Ms. Luisa Miceli, Visiting Fellow, School of
Language Studies, ANU; PhD Stduent, Dept. of Linguistics, University
of Western Australia Mr. Stephen Morey, (PhD Student), Monash University,
Melbourne Professor Gunter Senft, Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen Mr. Ross Slater, PhD Student, School of Language
Studies, ANU Assoc. Professor Søren Wichmann, Dept.
of General and Applied Linguistics, University of Copenhagen Dr Catharina Williams-van Klinken, Language
Director, Peace Corps, Dili, East Timor; Honorary Fellow Department
of Linguistics, University of Melbourne Dr Debra Ziegeler,School of English and Linguistics,
University of Manchester Dr Ghil'ad Zuckermann, Gulbenkian Research
Fellow, Churchill College; Research Fellow Dept. of Linguistics, University
of Cambridge |
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