Linguistics Research Group

Kate Burridge continues earlier PhD research that focused on the historical development of Dutch. More recently, this research has developed two additional strands; (1) the structure and history of English and (2) grammatical change in the varieties of German spoken by the Plain Anabaptists in North America (specifically the Amish/Mennonite communities in Ontario, Canada). Related research areas also include linguistic purism and taboo as a driver of linguistic change.

Julie Bradshaw is interested in language variation and sociolinguistic aspects of language change, particularly in relation to English.

Howard Manns is interested in language variation and the role of conversational stancetaking in linguistic and social change.  He is particularly interested in stance in English and Austronesian and Iranian languages.

Louisa Willoughby is interested in language variation as a marker of identities (ethnic, gendered, sexual etc) and its role in language change.

Alice Gaby is currently interested in the role of pragmatics in shaping grammatical structures, with a particular focus on the tensions between obfuscation, clarity and economy as causes of grammaticalization.

Anna Margetts has been working on morpho-syntactic and semantic change and the emergence of grammar with a focus on Oceanic languages.

Simon Musgrave conducts research on the linguistic prehistory of the area to the north of Australia, with a particular interest in the possibilities of applying computational techniques to historical linguistics.

Yacinta Kurniasih has been working in the area of language policy and its implementation at schools in Indonesia and the community attitudes toward policy. She is currently finishing her PhD on Javanese (regional/indigenous) language teaching policy in The Special District of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She has supervised an Honours research thesis on language maintenance of Indonesian migrant community in Germany.

Howard Manns has been studying language and identity in Malang, Indonesia.  His primary focus has been the adoption of Jakarta, English and Arabic styles by young people and in the mass media.  He has also written about the variety of Indonesian used for computer-mediated communication.

Anna Margetts has been working with oral discourse data from Oceanic languages (Saliba-Logea, PNG and Lau, Solomon Islands) since 1995. She is the chief investigator in the Saliba-Logea Documentation Project (with Carmen Dawuda, John Hajek, Andrew Margetts, and Ulrike Mosel) working with a community of speakers in Papua New Guinea. The project has established a still growing multi-media text corpus with which she is currently working. She has supervised research theses on indigenous languages of Oceania and Indonesia (Austronesian and Papuan).

Simon Musgrave has worked on Austronesian languages since 1996. He wrote his PhD thesis on aspects of the syntax of Indonesian. At the same time, he was involved in a research project at the University of Melbourne on the languages of Lombok and Sumbawa, especially the Sasak language. After completing his doctorate, Simon worked for two years in a project in the Netherlands which looked at Eastern Indonesia from an areal perspective, and he was then involved in a project based at Monash studying endangered languages in the Maluku region of Indonesia. The research started in that project has continued in efforts to document and describe the language Sou Amaa Teru from Ambon Island, Maluku.

Alice Gaby’s field interests lie primarily in Cape York Peninsula, where she has worked with the Pormpuraaw Aboriginal Community since 2002. During this time, she has collaborated on various language documentation and revitalization projects with the speakers and scions of Wik Iyenh, Kugu Muminh, Kugu Mu’inh, Kugu Uwanh, Kugu Yi’anh, Wik Mungkan and Kuuk Thaayorre. She has also conducted field research on topics in morphosyntax, semantics, the cultural context of language use and its cognitive significance. Though this research has mostly focused on Kuuk Thaayorre, Alice is currently building a corpus of audio and video recordings of multilingual interactions.

Anna Margetts has been working on the documentation of Oceanic languages since 1995 and has collected text data in Saliba-Logea (Papua New Guinea) and Lau (Solomon Islands) and is the chief investigator in the Saliba-Logea Documentation Project (with Carmen Dawuda, John Hajek, Andrew Margetts, and Ulrike Mosel) working with a community of speakers in Papua New Guinea. The project has established a text-audio linked multi-media corpus of over 35 hours. She has supervised research theses on indigenous languages of Oceania, Indonesia (Austronesian and Papuan) and Peru. In her distant past she worked on the analysis of discourse particles in Cayuga (Northern Iroquoian).

Simon Musgrave worked on the project "Cross-linguistic study of endangered Maluku languages: Eastern Indonesia and the Dutch diaspora” (with Margaret Florey and Michael Ewing). He worked on documentation of the language spoken in the villages of Tulehu, Tial, Tengah-tengah, Liang and Waai. Current research projects also include an investigation of knowledge of endangered languages amongst the Sudanese community in Melbourne (with John Hajek). He has supervised research theses on Austronesian and Papuan languages, and also researches and publishes in the areas of research ethics for language documentation and computer tools for linguists.

Kate Burridge has been working on the variety of German (Pennsylvania German) spoken by Mennonite communities in Ontario, Canada (and Pennsylvania) since 1986. In addition to grammatical aspects of the language, her work also addresses issues to do with language shift and language maintenance, and she has been supervising research theses in these areas.

Howard Manns has been working on the varieties of Javanese and Indonesian spoken in East Java, Indonesia.  He previously developed teaching materials for the U.S. Navy on varieties of Persian spoken in the Persian Gulf region.

Julie Bradshaw has worked with migrant communities and statistical data, to explore language maintenance and change in Australia. She is also interested in cultural factors, gender and the role of school-based language programs in language maintenance.

Louisa Willoughby is interested in language maintenance, shift and hybridisation in migrant communities, particularly as it relates to identity construction. She also has a strong interest in language policy and planning and works extensively on issues speakers of minority languages (including sign languages) face in accessing health and disability services.

Jim Hlavac has a research interest in grammatical and lexical innovation in migrant languages spoken in Melbourne and in code-switching in general. He is also interested in the domains and networks in which multilinguals use their languages and in language maintenance/shift factors amongst second and third generation speakers.

Simon Musgrave has conducted research in the Maluku region of Eastern Indonesia, an area with a long history of multilingualism and a current situation of language endangerment. His current research on language in the Sudanese community in  Melbourne includes an examination of language maintenance and language shift.

Alice Gaby is interested in how speakers bridge the grammatical gaps when using structurally very different languages in multilingual interactions.  Specifically, she is investigating how reference tracking is achieved in Pormpuraaw, an Aboriginal community of Cape York Peninsula, where most conversations involve two to four languages. Significantly, the three most widely spoken languages there – English, Kuuk Thaayorre and Kugu Nganhcara – possess extremely different reference tracking systems. In collaboration with postgraduate students, Alice is exploring the semantics and pragmatics of demonstratives in these three languages as they are used alone and in combination, as well as the different kinds of contribution gesture and language make in referring to locations, depending on the language.

Anna Margetts has been working in a small language community in Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea with speaker the Oceanic language Saliba-Logea. The region has a long history of language contact and multilingualism and was a prehistoric contact area with non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea.

Kate Burridge is interested in the role of contact in language change. Specifically, her research focuses on the Pennsylvania German-English contact situation in the Amish/Mennonite communities of Ontario, Canada.

Howard Manns has been exploring a complex case of multilingualism in East Java, Indonesia.  He is interested in how these speakers use Javanese, Indonesian, Arabic and English styles to enact conversational stances and the resulting implications for language shift.

Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou is interested in how multilingual individuals communicate online. Her research focuses on Japanese-English contact situations in chat, email, social networking, online games, mobile phone messages and other forms of Computer Mediated Communication.

Marisa Cordella is currently working on an ARC linkage grant in the area of intercultural and intergenerational and second language development
http://arts.monash.edu.au/intergenerational