Research Projects

Comparative study of Polynesian plant names

Investigator: Dr. Karl Rensch (Visiting Fellow, School of Language Studies, ANU). Karl Rensch is currently collecting data on Polynesian plant names from library resources and field work in situ with the aim of publishing a comparative dictionary of Polynesian plant names. He is also working on the ethnobotany of the Marquesas Islands.

Contact-induced change in structure and lexicon in Austronesian

Dr. Anthony Grant (member of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages) has a major interest in case studies of profound and intimate contact-induced change in structure and lexicon, and the effects that this and other modes of especially rapid lexical/structural change in slected languages have for our understanding of how languages change, and for our understanding of cladistic means of language classification. Many of the languages which Anthony examines are Austronesian and he is very interested in certain kinds of changes (including changes which are apparently internally-driven) which some Austronesian languages have undergone. Anthony has recently presented a paper entitled “On the problems inherent in substantiating a lingustic area: the case of the Western Micronesian sprachbund” at the Conference on Linguistic Areas, Convergence and Language Change at the University of Manchester, UK (22-23 November, 2002). His abstract can be read here.

On the development of (a)symmetrical systems in AN languages and its implications on voice markings and voice alternations

This project on historical linguistics includes gathering evidence (and implications) for the development that leads to current mixed grammatical alignments in AN languages, particularly addressing the issues of symmetrical versus non-symmetrical properties. Investigator: Dr. Wayan Arka (RSPAS, ANU)

The morphosyntax of Proto Oceanic

Reconstructing the basic sentence structures of the language ancestral to the Austronesian languages spoken in Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, with emphasis on the reconstruction of the case-marking system and plotting the diachronic changes that have led to the case-marking systems of contemporary Oceanic languages.

Investigators: Dr. Ritsuko Kikusawa (RSPAS, ANU), Dr. Malcolm Ross (RSPAS, ANU), Professor Andrew Pawley (RSPAS, ANU) & Dr. Isabell Bril (LACITO-CNRS, Paris), Dr. Lawrence Reid (University of Hawai'i)

The Proto Oceanic lexicon project

Reconstructing the lexicon of the language ancestral to the Austronesian languages of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, with emphasis on terminologies associated with particular fields. The Proto Oceanic language was almost certainly associated with the rapid colonisation of Island Melanesia and the central Pacific by bearers of the Lapita culture between about 1500 and 1000BC. Investigators: Professor Andrew Pawley (RSPAS, ANU); Dr. Malcolm Ross (RSPAS, ANU)

Tetun language teaching and contact issues

Dr. Catharina Williams-van Klinken has recently published A grammar of Fehan dialect of Tetun, an Austronesian language of West Timor (Pacific Linguistics, 1999). She has recently taken up a position with the Pece Corps, Dili, East Timor as language director. In this capacity she is setting up a 3-month intensive course in Tetun language which means she has to deal with language contact in a practical way—how do you teach a language which has lots of contact with 3 different languages (Portuguese, Indonesian and Tetun Terik), and in which the 3 languages have different levels of influence depending on the segment of society you are mixing with, and on the social context?

Valence-changing devices in Proto Oceanic

Dr. Bethwyn Evans has recently completed a PhD thesis (RSPAS, ANU), on “A study of valence-changing devices in Proto Oceanic” (2001), which examined valence-changing devices and morphosyntactic classes of verbs in the Oceanic languages of the Austronesian family, and presented a reconstruction of these. Beth also wrote a First Class honours thesis “Reconstructing object markers in Oceanic” in 1995. In addition to the Austronesian world, Beth has been working on documenting and recording the Wardaman, Jawoyn and Dalabon languages of Australia.

Caucasian [back to top]

Professor Alice Harris (Professor of Linguistics, SUNY, StonyBrook, New York) has been awarded funding by the National Science Foundation (U.S.A.), BCS-0215523 for the project “Diachronic Morphology in Cross-Linguistic Perspective” (effective August 1, 2002). Alice was awarded a National Science Foundation grant (BCS-0091691) for 2001-2002 to research the “Synchrony and Diachrony of the word in Georgian”. In Georgian (a member of Kartvelian, South Caucasian language family) the structures of certain complex words pose a challenge to current theories of the word. The synchronic goals of this project were to produce a detailed description of the phonological word and morphosyntactic word in Georgian, including a complete description of coordination inside words, phrasal recursivity, and anaphoric islandhood.

Recently Completed Project
Alice Harris’ book Endoclitics and the Origins of Udi Morphosyntax was published in 2002 by Cambridge University Press. It was the outcome of National Science Foundation Grant SBR-9710085.

Germanic [back to top]

Diachronic English Syntax

Dr. Cynthia Allen (School of Language Studies, ANU) has long been researching aspects of the history of English grammar from the Middle Ages, based on a first-hand examination of the texts. She is the author of the article “English: Old English” in the (2005) second edition of Elsevier’s The Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics, Her most recent work has focused primarily on the relationship between morphological and syntactic change. Beginning with “The Origins of the ‘Group Genitive’ in English,” Transactions of the Philological Society 95:1 (1997), she has written a series of articles examining the relationship between the loss of case marking and the development of possessives in English, including “Deflexion and the Development of the Genitive in English,” English Language and Linguistics 7.1 (2003). In 2002, she was awarded ARC grant DP0208153 to look at the relationship between the loss of case marking and developments surrounding genitive case in the Germanic languages and is currently writing up some of her findings in a monograph which takes a typological perspective and compares the English developments with other Germanic languages. Her chapter “Case Syncretism and Word Order Change” is to appear in Blackwell’s Handbook of the History of English.

Contact-induced language change in Western Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries: the impact of immigrants in the history of the Dutch language

Investigator: Dr. Jennifer Hendriks (School of Language Studies, ANU)
Due to the deeply entrenched (though erroneous) belief in the particular importance of elite social groups in the process of linguistic change, the linguistic histories and handbooks of Dutch have considered relevant only one brief wave of 'prestigious' migration from the southern Netherlands—that is, what is now Flanders in Belgium. The far larger number of immigrants from the east (modern-day Germany) has been ignored, due to the belief that they were of low social standing and therefore of little or no linguistic importance. However examination of letters and diaries written by these immigrants is showing that they were of great importance linguistically. This project, not only aims at re-writing the linguistic histories of Dutch, but also concerns itself with investigating what sort of social relations play a role in language change.

The origin of the affirmative, declarative use of English DO in the 13th century, and its decline by the start of the 18th century

Investigator: Dr. Debra Ziegeler (School of English and Linguistics, University of Manchester)

The mystery of the rise of the affirmative, declarative use of DO in the 13th century and its decline by the start of the 18th centry remains one of the principal unsolved problems for linguists working in historical research. Some of the main arguments on the origins of DO discuss the needs of poetic rhyme (e.g. Engblom 1938), the positioning of the adverb (e.g. Ogura 1993), the elimination of awkward consonant clusters (e.g. Stein 1990), and the ambiguities of object referents in questions (Hudson 1997), much of the earlier historical research centering around hypotheses relating to internal problems of the system. More recently, the trend has been to abandon altogether any linguistic explanation for the emergence of an apparently redundant grammaticalise auxiliary in favour of explanations relating to stylistic and sociolinguistic factors (e.g. Nurmi 1999). Few of the recent or earlier accounts, however, are able to satisfactorily provide an explanation of the semantic transition from a causative main verb in Old English to the apparently 'empty' auxiliary in Middle and Early Modern English. The present study examines the development of causativity, viewed from a diachronic, construction-based approach, and offers the explanation that the reanalysis and subsequent disappearance of the affirmantive, unemphatic auxiliary DO took place via a process of hyperanalysis (Croft 2000), resulting in the co-lexicalisation of the causative verb within the semantics of the main verb.

Indo-Aryan [back to top]

Investigator: Matthew Toulmin. Matthew Toulmin is working on a book based on his Ph.D. thesis, which was a historical description of the development of the Rajbanshi/Kamatapuri varieties based on comparative reconstruction of lexicon, phonology and morphology. In this thesis he explores solutions to the methodological problems encountered by the comparative method in reconstructing changes that occur in dialect continuua.

Japanese [back to top]

The history of the syntax of certain central and peripheral Japanese dialects

In particular, investigating the loss/retention of a syntactic phenomenon known as kakari-musubi, and its concomitant verbal inflections. Investigator: Dr. Peter Hendriks (Faculty of Asian Studies, ANU)

An investigation into the claims of the influence of Western languages on the syntax of the Japanese language.

Dutch has been credited with the introduction of a new type of passive into Japanese.However, a careful search through pre-contact (pre 1600) written Japanese materials shows that this passive has existed in the Japanese language since close to the beginning of its written history (712). Investigator: Dr. Peter Hendriks (Faculty of Asian Studies, ANU)

Early linguistic contact between Indonesia (Java) and Japan

An investigation into the possibility of hitherto unrecognised but substantial Indonesian influence on early Japanese civilisation. Supporting evidence is gathered from rice genetics, bio-anthropology especially mitochondrial DNA, as well as suggestive archeological material. A corpus of loanwords including items referring to rice cultivation, metallurgy, weaving of cloth, development of communal storehouses, and the introduction of new rituals and beliefs ( e.g. sawah~saFa ‘rice paddy’; duduk~turuki: ‘sword, weapon’; tapih~taFe2: ‘cloth’) not only corroborates this evidence but also reveals the nature of the influence. Investigators: Professor Ann Kumar (Faculty of Asian Studies, ANU) and Dr. Phil Rose (School of Language Studies, ANU)

Mayan [back to top]

Mayan Comparative Phonology

Dr. Søren Wichmann (Associate Research Professor, Department of General and Applied Lingusitics, University of Copenhagen) is working on a research project “Mayan comparative phonology in the light of some recent new interpretations of the orthography of the Ch'olan hieroglyphic inscriptions”.

Mon-Khmer (Austroasiatic) [back to top]

Linguistic prehistory in Southeast Asia: 2000 years of contact between Austroasiatic and Austronesian speakers

Funded by the Australian Research Council, the project focuses on two Austroasiatic language groups, Bahnaric and Katuic, and one Austronesian, Chamic, which are located mainly in Vietnam and neighbouring countries. These languages have been in continuous contact for around 2000 years. The aim is to intensively investigate the history of language contact and change, leading to improved understanding of the general processes involved, and the histories of the particular languages and peoples. Investigator: Dr. Paul Sidwell (RSPAS, ANU)

The Katuic-Bahnaric Nexus

Investigator: Dr. Paul Sidwell (RSPAS, ANU). Funded by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, the project revises and integrates the reconstruction of Proto-Katuic and Proto-Bahnaric, to yield a model of a) how they diverged from a common ancestor in pre-history, and b) how they then continued to influence each other through ongoing intimate contact up to the present day.

Reconstruction of the morphological system of Proto West Bahnaric

Investigator: Ms. Pascale Jacq. The once rich morphological system of Proto Mon Khmer has survived to some extent in Proto West Bahnaric. However the Proto West Bahnaric prefixing and infixing system is only reconstructible when we make a comprehensive comparison (including phonological reconstruction) of the languages. This is because not one of the daughter languages spoken today (including Jru' (Laven), Hââñ (Nhaheun), Oi, Laveh, Cheng, Sapuar) has any productive morphology, and various phonological and word structure changes have masked important distinctions such as prefix voicing.

Kuy dialects

Investigator: Mr. Ross Slater (PhD student, Linguistics, School of Language Studies, ANU). Ross is writing a grammar of the Kuy (Katuic) Mon-Khmer language. He is interested in historical comparative grammar in Southeast Asia, mechanisms of change and comparison of Kuy dialects of different sociolinguistic settings (e.g. of Thailand, Laos and Cambodia).

Papuan [back to top]

Comparative Papuan linguistics

Investigators: Professor Andrew Pawley (RSPAS, ANU), Dr. Malcolm Ross (RSPAS, ANU), Professor William Foley (University of Sydney). A reconstruction of the prehistory of the Trans New Guinea phylum, the large group of languages spanning much of mainland New Guinea and reaching west to Timor and Alor.

East Papuan Outlier languages

Dr. Angela Terrill (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen) focusses on unravelling the relationships between the East Papuan Outlier languages, the Papuan languages of New Britain, New Ireland, Rossel Island, Bougainville and the Solomon Islands. The East Papuan Outliers are thought to be the linguistic remnants of the original Papuan populations which came to the area possibly around 40,000 years ago. These Papuan languages are now surrounded by the closely-related (and much better understood) Oceanic languages, of the Austronesian family. Speakers of Austronesian languages are though to have come to the area around 4000 years ago. The relationships between the East Papuan Outliers is not clear; some previous research has suggested that they are all members of one family, however this is by no means certain.

Together with Steve Levinson (MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen), Ger Reesink (Leiden University and MPI, Nijmegen), and Michael Dunn (MPI Nijmegen), we have begun a collaborative projec ton these languaes. Our project aims to encourage and coordinate descriptive, typological and historical research, and to investigate typological and historical connections between the east Papuan Outliers. The East Papuan Outliers are also an excellent area for investigating questions of language contact. Preliminary investigation suggests that prolonged cultural contact between Papuan and Austronesian languages in this area has left very different degrees of linguistic impressions on these Papuan languages.

Pidgins and Creoles [back to top]

Pidgin and Creole languages of Australia and the Pacific

The principal aim of this program is to demonstrate and define the formative steps in the development of modern Pacific pidgins and creoles, particularly Bislama (Vanuatu), Pijin (Solomon Islands) and Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea) and their relationship to Australian pidgins such as Kriol (Northern Territory) and Broken (Torres Strait). Various Investigators: Professor Darrell Tryon (RSPAS, ANU), Dr Jean-Michel Charpentier (CNRS, Paris), Professor Peter Mühlhäusler (University of Adelaide), Assoc. Prof. Terry Crowley (University of Waikato, New Zealand)

Study of Tahitian French

Ms. Susan Love (PhD student, RSPAS, ANU) has conducted postgraduate work on the study of French pidgins and creoles, in particular a french pidgin of Vietnam: Tây Bôy, and is now considering varieties of French in the Asia-Pacific Region. In March 2002, Susan began a PhD thesis studying Tahitian French. A description of Tahitian French, previously not fully described, will form a major part of the work, although the language will be placed in the wider context of the movement of peoples, whether for conquest, trade, colonialisation, the penal system or labour. These displacements spread languages throughout the Pacific. While certain indigneous languages were influenced by colonial or immigrant languages, these populations also took their speech to other destinations, thus a comparative study of varieties of Pacific French may therefore be possible.

Romance [back to top]

The Romanian verbal system

Investigators: Mrs. Laura Daniliuc (School of Languages, ANU), Mr. Radu Daniliuc (School of Languages, ANU). The present project is a continuation of a previous one, already materialized in Descriptive Romanian Grammar. An Outline (Lincom Europa, Munich: 2000). It is conceived not only as a descriptive presentation of the Romanian verbal system, but also as a comparison with other sister languages (French in particular) and as an account of its historical evolution from Latin up to nowadays. Besides the description of the Modern Romanian verbal morphology and syntax, this project is also concerned with a presentation of the Romanian language as a Romance language, a sketch of its troubled history and an outline of the transformations suffered by the verbal system as compared to other Romance languages.

Although using inherited material, the Romance verbal system is fundamentally different from that of Latin. In spite of the fact that the person and number categories remain basically the same in Romance, the more complicate categories of tense, mood and aspect go through substantial restructuring both in terms of the grammatical oppositions and of their formal expression. Some linguists have called Romanian “the least Romance” among all languages of the group. However, the essential Latin character of Romanian has lasted in spite a long period of separation from the other Romance languages. This project intends to show that the relationship between the Romanian verbal system and its Latin ancestor is still one of the most solid ones among Romance languages.

Evolution of prefixes and particles in French

Professor Mireille Tremblay (Principal Investigator, Queen’s University, Canada), Monique Dufresne (co-researcher), and Fernande Dupuis (co-researcher) have funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2001-2004) for their research project entitled “Préverbes, particules et grammaticalisation : évolution des systèmes aspectuels 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. Notre étude comporte trois volets:

Un volet descriptif qui 1-fournira une description détaillée des propriétés sémantiques et morphosyntaxiques et de la productivité des préfixes et des particules en AF; 2-effectuera une comparaison des deux systèmes; et 3-examinera leur déclin.

Un volet théorique portant sur la catégorisation de l’aspect, la distinction entre morphologie et syntaxe et le processus de grammaticalisation des prépositions aspectuelles.

Un volet informatique dans lequel nous entendons, avec d’autres équipes, améliorer l’exploitabilité des corpus existants (catégorisation et codification) en développant des outils d’analyse et de recherche textuelles et des séquences de traitement mettant en relation plusieurs outils de recherche.

Sino-Tibetan [back to top]

Historical development of tone and tone sandhi in the Wu Dialects of Chinese

Drs Rose and Zhu are currently exhaustively describing the sandhi synchronically over most of the Wu area. The project within the CRLC addresses its diachronic aspects, and will determine how the sandhi arose and diversified. In addition, material on the segmentals has been collected and analysed, which will allow a complete reconstruction of Wu historical phonology. Investigators: Dr. Phil Rose (School of Languages, ANU), Dr. Zhu Xiaonong (Linguistics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

Tai-Kadai [back to top]

Tai historical linguistics

Tracing language change in Thai, Lao and related languages in the Tai-Kadai family, along with consideration of possible linkages with other families in the area. Changes investigated have ranged from phonetics & phonology through syntax/semantics/pragmatics. Some important Thai changes, such as grammaticalisation, have implications across this range. The current project “The Thai and Lao Writing Systems: Phonological Change and Orthographic Practice” emphasises evaluation of Thai–Lao written sources, going back some 700 years, as potential evidence in understanding historical linguistic change.Close cooperation with Dr. Phil Rose’s research on tonal systems has helped analysis of the compound tonal systems of bi– and tri– dialectal Tai speakers. Results have been of value in identifying key mechanisms of diachronic change in the Tai family. Chief Investigator: Dr. Anthony Diller.

Historical-Comparative Study of Tai, Kam-Sui, and related languages of China

Based on field work elicitations on location, Professor Jerold Edmondson, (Linguistics, University of Texas, Arlington) has been documenting the sound/lexical and to some extent grammatical change within this language family, and language contact phenomena He has also worked on language contact phenomena.

Tai languages of Assam

Mr. Stephen Morey, (Linguistics, Monash University, Melbourne) has completed a PhD thesis on “The Tai Languages of Assam—a Grammar and Texts” and has been offered a postdoctoral fellowship at the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (to be taken up in mid 2003). Several interesting historical processes can be observed in these languages, such as Tone change and the development of bound morphology in a language family which is largely isolating. His thesis is in the form of a printed book and CD with links to soundfiles and texts in the Tai languages.

Theories of Language Change [back to top]

Theory of language change

The roles of language change in (i) improving our ability to reconstruct linguistic prehistory and to interpret the relationship of that linguistic prehistory to archaeological and ethnographic findings and (ii) contributing to a better understanding of the architecture of language as a cognitive system. Various Investigators: Dr. Cynthia Allen (School of Languages, ANU), Professor Andrew Pawley (RSPAS, ANU), Dr. Malcolm Ross (RSPAS, ANU), Professor Matthew Spriggs (Archaeology and Anthropology, ANU), Dr. Peter Bellwood (Archaeology and Anthropology, ANU), Dr. Avery Andrews (School of Languages, ANU), Dr. Harold Koch (School of Languages, ANU), Dr. John Bowden (RSPAS, ANU)

Contact-induced change

This field is one which has seen an efflorescence in the last decade and encompasses the effects on a language of contact between its speakers and speakers of another language. Most often the vehicle of change is speakers' bilingualism. The aims of this project are to understand the processes of language change well enough to (i) be able to recognise them in the data we collect and thereby detect historic associations between speaker groups, and (ii) to make a significant contribution to cognitive aspects of linguistic theory. Various Investigators: Dr. Malcolm Ross (RSPAS, ANU), Dr. John Bowden (RSPAS, ANU), Dr. Harold Koch (School of Languages, ANU), Dr. Patrick McConvell (AIATSIS), Dr. Paul Sidwell (RSPAS, ANU), Dr. Jennifer Hendriks (School of Languages, ANU), Dr. Kevin Windle (School of Languages, ANU), Professor Jerold Edmondson, (Linguistics, University of Texas, Arlington), Mr. Evershed Amuzu (recent PhD student in Linguistics, School of Language Studies, ANU)

Mr. Evershed Amuzu has completed his PhD in Linguistics at the ANU. His main interest is in the sociolinguistics of bilingualism involving Ghanaian languages and English, Ghana’s official language. For his dissertation, he investigated patterns of bilingual language use by Ewe-English bilinguals and outlined the sociolinguistic dynamics and bilingual language production mechanisms that underpin ongoing language contact phenomena in parts of the Ewe speech community in Ghana.

Ms. Luisa Miceli is a PhD student in Linguistics (University of Western Australia) and has been awarded an Italian Government Grant to be taken up at the University of Pavia in January 2003 to study language contact in a multilingual Alpine valley for 9 months.

Dr Ghil'ad Zuckermann (Gulbenkian Research Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge; Research Fellow, Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge) is researching the camoflaged influence of English on the World’s languages, exploring the way languages such as Mandarin, Japanese, and Israeli use phono-semantic matching of English lexical items. His book Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew is being published this year by Palgrave Macmillan. For more information see his website: http://www.zuckermann.org

Cognitive Science and evolution: models of language change and acquisition

Professor Michael Arbib (Director, USC Brain Project, University of Southern California) is on a quest to understand the brain mechanisms which make it possible for humans to acquire language. His key effort is to develop an evolutionary framework to locate language in relation to brain mechanisms for action and perception that we share with other primates, feeding into the integration of insights from primate studies and human brain imaging to develop a computational neurolinguistics. Michael also looks for insights from developmental studies to relate the development of language in the child to increasing success in both pragmatic and social interaction with the world. The connection with the CRLC is that he hopes to gain insights from historical and comparative linguistics to see to what extent languages exhibit innovations across the centuries and millenia—trying to better understand the tradeoff between biological evolution and “cultural evolution” in establishing the spread of human languages that we see today.

Mr. Mark Dras (Department of Computing, Macquarie University, Australia) has been working with a linguist, David Harrison (Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania) on the modelling of language change. In particular, they are developing a computer simulation which at this early stage is modelling the specific phenomenon of the evolution of vowel harmony of Turkic languages.

Language maintenance and shift

The main research interest of Dr. Daniel Martín (School of Language Studies, Australian National University) is the theoretical status of factors affecting language maintenance and shift and implications for the practice of Sociolinguistics. His recent seminar in our series in November 2002 explored the influence of ethnolinguistic concentration in language maintenance and shift. He used data from the 1996 Australian Census and drew conclusions about the status of the existence of language islands or Sprachinseln affecting language maintenance and shift. Daniel has completed his PhD at ANU on the Spanish-speaking community in Australia in 1988, and currently teaches Spanish at the Australian National University.

Processes of syntactic change

Focussing on (i) English historical syntax and (ii) the genesis of Serial Verb constructions from paratactic constructions and perhaps other sources. The field of historical syntax is another one that has seen a great increase in activity in recent years. The study of English historical syntax has a long tradition while the study of the genesis of serial verb constructions is a very new area. Both areas are benefiting currently from advances in syntactic theory. Investigators: Dr. Avery Andrews (School of Languages, ANU), Dr. Cynthia Allen (School of Languages, ANU)

[back to top]