Monash Linguistics Past Seminars
Seminar Semester 1/2009
17th March
Presentations by the Monash Linguistics Honours Price winners 2008:
Rosemary Billington
Location, location, location!: Regional characteristics and national patterns of change in the vowels of Melbourne adolescents.
Rebekah Bennets
A linguistic analysis of personal correspondence between members of North American Mennonite communities in the late nineteenth century
Manton Theatre SG01/11 (ground floor Menzies Bld)
(abstracts)
24th March
PhD Confirmation talk:
Katrina Langford
Nouns and noun phrases in Fataluku, a non-Austronesian language of East Timor
Manton Theatre SG01/11 (ground floor, Menzies Bld)
(abstract)
7th April
Wolfgang Wildgen (Bremen University, Germany)
Linguistic functionalism from a dynamic perspective and cognitive grammar
ST2/25 (building 25)
(abstract)
21st April
Margaret Gearon (Education, Monash University)
Late partial immersion students’ written discourse
Room 173, Building 6 (Education Building)
(abstract)
12th May
Catherine E. Travis (University of New Mexico, USA)
Timothy Jowan Curnow (University of South Australia)
Anaphora and deixis in discourse: A case study of Spanish locational
adverbs
Room 173, Building 6 (Education Building)
(abstract)
26th May
Louisa Willoughby (MonashUniversity and the Victorian Deaf Society)
Language needs and language choices: the linguistic situation of deaf migrants and their families living in Victoria
New location: Manton Room SG02, Building 11 (ground floor Menzies Bld)
(abstract)
Abstracts
17th March
Rosemary Billington, Linguistics Honours Prize winner 2008
Location, location, location!: Regional characteristics and national patterns of change in the vowels of Melbourne adolescents.
Recent evidence has suggested that the phonetic characteristics of Australian English vowels are changing, but investigations into Australian English vowel shifting have primarily involved data from New South Wales. Early accounts held that Australian English was remarkably uniform, but in light of recent evidence of regional vowel variation, this necessitates further exploration. The present study widens the scope of investigation into vowel shifting and variation by providing comparable data from Melbourne.
Recordings were made of productions of the 18 vowels of Australian English by male and female adolescents from Melbourne. Frequency values were extracted for the first and second formants, and compared with recent data from Sydney and Adelaide, as well as 1960s New South Wales data, to investigate three hypotheses: 1) regional differences will be present in the vowels of different Australian states, 2) vowel innovation is likely to exist for Melbourne adolescents, but will interact with regional vowel characteristics, and 3) gender differences will be present in the degree to which Melbourne males and females orient to innovation or regional affiliation in their vowel realisations.
The results indicate that there are clearly identifiable regional characteristics present in the vowels of different Australian states. These obscure general observations of the vowel shift in Melbourne, but some clear indications of vowel innovation are present. Females display more supralocal, potentially innovative features, while males display more pronounced regional characteristics. This study contributes to the ongoing exploration of the proposed Australian vowel shift and its dissemination in different regional centres.
Rebekah Bennets, Linguistics Honours Prize winner 2008
A linguistic analysis of personal correspondence between members of North American Mennonite communities in the late nineteenth century
Although a great deal has been written about the Pennsylvania German language and the tenaciously diglossic situation in the sectarian groups who speak this language, writing within these communities has largely been ignored. No analysis exists of the linguistic situation before the twentieth century, and no study has been conducted on the language used in personal communication. Consequently, little is known about the roles of German and English in writing at this time or the structure of the German used.
In this study, 157 letters from members of Mennonite communities in North America in the late nineteenth century were analysed in order to answer three questions: what was the role of English in the Mennonite communities in the late nineteenth century; what did written German look like in personal communication at this time; and what can this data tell us about Pennsylvania German at this time and the role of English in recent changes.
It was found that although the majority of correspondence was in German, there was evidence that the use and knowledge of English was much more widespread than previously thought. The language of writing showed significant differences to both High German and Pennsylvania German, representing a separate variety. Finally, a number of features present in contemporary Pennsylvania German were found to be non-existent or in earlier stages of development at the time of this data, suggesting the recency of these changes; the role of English in these changes could not be determined from this data.
24th March
Katrina Langford
Nouns and noun phrases in Fataluku, a non-Austronesian language of East Timor
Fataluku is a Non-Austronesian (or Papuan) language spoken in the eastern part of East Timor. It is one of only three non-Austronesian languages in East Timor, the other ten languages being Austronesian. There are around 30,000 native speakers of Fataluku, the majority of whom are subsistence farmers. Most speakers also speak other languages besides Fataluku, the most prevalent being Tetun, Indonesian, and Portuguese.
My thesis will be a reference grammar of Fataluku. Fataluku is an
S-O-V language, with a strict constituent order. It has postpositions and Genitive-Noun ordering. The language has little morphology. This confirmation paper looks at Nouns and Noun Phrases. I discuss the criteria which define nouns as a word class, classes of nouns, the structure of the Noun Phrase, and the word classes that can cooccur as modifiers or determiners with the noun.
7th April
Wolfgang Wildgen (University of Bremen, Germany)
Linguistic functionalism from a dynamic perspective and cognitive grammar
In the first part the tradition of linguistic functionalism (Jakobson, Martinet) is sketched and an actual version which reflects the discussion on the evolution of language is presented. The controversial position of Labov, who rejects a Darwinean interpretation of linguistic functionalism, is discussed. The inner linguistic economy of grammar and lexicon, which was at the heart of Prague-school functionalism, may be reformulated in the framework of self-organization and central topics of functionalism can be redefined in the context of dynamical linguistics. The basics of this approach are summarized. In this context, three positions in cognitive grammar (taken by: Talmy, Lakoff, and Langacker) are reinterpreted in terms of a functional-dynamic treatment, and central examples are reanalysed: force dynamics, metaphorical mapping und construals).
Finally the question is asked, how linguistic theory should develop in future under the impact of cognitive sciences (e.g. a neural theory of language) and more context oriented theories like evolutionary biology and sociolinguistics.
Publications of the author on the topic:
Wildgen, Wolfgang, 1994. Process, Image, and Meaning. A Realistic Model of the Meanings of Sentences and Narrative Texts, Series: Pragmatics and Beyond, New Series, No. 31, Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Wildgen, Wolfgang 2004. The Evolution of Human Language. Scenarios, Principles, and Cultural Dynamics, Series: Advances in Consciousness Research, Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Wildgen Wolfgang, 2007. Linguistic Functionalism in an Evolutionary Context. Conference given at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europæth; 29 of August - 1st of September, University of Joensuu, Finland. ppt.
Wildgen, Wolfgang, 2008. Kognitive Grammatik. Klassische Paradigmen und neue Perspektiven, de Gruyter, Berlin.
Wildgen, Wolfgang, 2009. Sketch of an Evolutionary Grammar Based on Comparative Biolinguistics. in: Röska-Hardy, Louise S. and Eva M. Neumann-Held (eds.). Learning from Animals? Examining the Nature of Human Uniqueness Psychology Press, Hove and New York: 45-59.
Wildgen, Wolfgang, forthcoming 2009. "The 'dynamic turn' in cognitive linguistics"; in: Heli Tissari (ed.) Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, prepublished by: eVarieng, Helsinki. pdf.
21st April
Margaret Gearon (Education, Monash University)
Late partial immersion students’ written discourse
A Late Partial Immersion Program in French was introduced in 1998 at an independent girls’ school in Melbourne, Australia. The first group of 24 students was selected from a larger group of applicants, some of whom had come from an Early Partial Immersion program at a local government primary school. Three years into the program designed for this pilot group, as part of an on-going evaluation, the students were asked to write about their experiences in the partial immersion program. This activity took place immediately after they had spent Term 3 of their third year in the program at the school’s country campus, where they could only maintain their French through email correspondence with their teacher. Their writing was analysed in terms of the grammatical (morphological and syntactical) errors the students made. The analysis demonstrates that later partial immersion students in one Australian program write phonetically, have difficulty with gender and number, and appear to have a written interlanguage where structures are still heavily influenced by English syntax.
12th May
Catherine E. Travis (University of New Mexico, USA)
Timothy Jowan Curnow (University of South Australia)
Anaphora and deixis in discourse: A case study of Spanish locational
adverbs
Deixis and anaphora are often presented as distinct, though related, phenomena: deixis is used when an expression refers to something that can be pointed out within the physical space or time of the moment of utterance, while anaphora is used when an expression refers to something which is mentioned in the discourse (e.g. Halliday and Hasan 1976; Levinson 1983). While it has been recognized that it is possible for deixis and anaphora to be expressed simultaneously (e.g. Lyons 1977: 676), some studies have suggested that tokens that are difficult or impossible to categorize are in fact very common (Ariel 1998). Corpus-based studies of deixis and anaphora (e.g. Averintseva-Klisch and Consten 2007; Botley 2006) have primarily focused on demonstrative adjective and pronoun forms (‘this’, ‘that’ and equivalents in other languages). In this paper, we consider the Spanish locative adverbs, proximal aquí / acá ‘here’, medial ahí ‘there’, and distal allí / allá ‘there’. An analysis of approximately 1,000 tokens of these adverbs drawn from a corpus of spontaneous Colombian Spanish conversation confirms that, as for demonstratives, the deictic and anaphoric uses of locational adverbs are intrinsically intertwined. We consider in detail the relationship between them and how they interact with functions of use of the adverbs.
References
Ariel, Mira. 1998. The linguistic status of the 'here and now'. Cognitive Linguistics 9(3): 189-237.
Averintseva-Klisch, Maria and Manfred Consten. 2007. The role of discourse topic and proximity for demonstratives in German and Russian. Languages in contrast 7(2): 221-240.
Botley, Simon Philip. 2006. Indirect anaphora: Testing the limits of corpus-based linguistics. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 11(1): 73-112.
Halliday, M.A.K. and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Levinson, Stephen. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
26th May
Louisa Willoughby (Monash University and the Victorian Deaf Society)
Language needs and language choices: the linguistic situation of deaf migrants and their families living in Victoria
For all migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, negotiating language choice in Australian society is a complex business. However, deaf migrants and their families face a particularly complicated linguistic situation as they need to negotiate not only the role English and the oral language of their country of origin will play in their lives, but also Auslan (Australian sign language) and any sign systems that they may have learnt in the country of origin. The linguistic situation of migrant families with deaf members has received some scholarly attention in recent years (cf. Ahmed 1998, Gerner de Garcia 1995), however the factors influencing families to adopt certain strategies over others and the overall affect of having a deaf family member on language maintenance and shift remain poorly understood.
This seminar focuses on the linguistic situation of deaf people from migrant backgrounds living in Victoria and the challenges and opportunities they face in negotiating their language options and making language choices. Beginning with the macro view it outlines research findings on the numbers of deaf migrants currently living in Victoria, the opportunities currently available to these families for language learning and the likely consequences of this for communication within the family and with the wider society. It then takes a micro view of how language choice is negotiated in seven NESB families with severe-profoundly deaf primary school aged children. Through this analysis we see how the complex interplay of individual attitudes towards the various languages available, institutional constraints and the child’s own progress in language acquisition shapes overall patterns of language choice and lead to markedly different outcomes in terms of the quality of communication between parents and their children. The seminar closes by reflecting on the policy implications of these findings.
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Victorian Multicultural Commission and the Victorian Deaf Society, who funded this research project.