Community languages in early 21st Century Australia. Drawing on the 2001 and earlier censuses, three in-depth studies and a survey of community institutions, this project will provide an up-to-date assessment of the use and maintenance levels of a range of community languages and of Australia's changing language demography. It will test models of language maintenance/shift and the impact of census question changes on the calculation of language shift. It will contribute to the international lite ....Community languages in early 21st Century Australia. Drawing on the 2001 and earlier censuses, three in-depth studies and a survey of community institutions, this project will provide an up-to-date assessment of the use and maintenance levels of a range of community languages and of Australia's changing language demography. It will test models of language maintenance/shift and the impact of census question changes on the calculation of language shift. It will contribute to the international literature in the field as well as to a greater understanding of our own community. The latter will allow an informed approach to Australian language policy issues in the early twenty-first century.Read moreRead less
Indigenous languages of eastern East Timor: description and contact studies. 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 chan ....Indigenous languages of eastern East Timor: description and contact studies. 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.Read moreRead less
Social cognition and language - the design resources of grammatical diversity. This project will (a) improve Australia's capacity to interact and communicate with other cultures (b) promote advanced training and research (including 9 doctoral students) on the languages of our region (c) carry out extensive new research on 20 languages of the Pacific region, most of which represent gravely endangered cultural traditions (d) draw on the design solutions identified in these languages to develop ....Social cognition and language - the design resources of grammatical diversity. This project will (a) improve Australia's capacity to interact and communicate with other cultures (b) promote advanced training and research (including 9 doctoral students) on the languages of our region (c) carry out extensive new research on 20 languages of the Pacific region, most of which represent gravely endangered cultural traditions (d) draw on the design solutions identified in these languages to develop models appropriate to the social cognition element of human-computer and computer-computer interfacesRead moreRead less
Religious authority and linguistic change in late antique Egypt: non-elite perspectives on the rise of monasticism in contemporary documents. This will enhance Australia's hard-earned profile in the fields which contribute to its approach, promoting internationally the quality of local research. It poses questions which multilingual societies drawn from different migratory strands and strong indigenous traditions must face. Its answers will contribute to the debates Australia continues to have o ....Religious authority and linguistic change in late antique Egypt: non-elite perspectives on the rise of monasticism in contemporary documents. This will enhance Australia's hard-earned profile in the fields which contribute to its approach, promoting internationally the quality of local research. It poses questions which multilingual societies drawn from different migratory strands and strong indigenous traditions must face. Its answers will contribute to the debates Australia continues to have on these issues. It directly contributes to the preservation of the culture of Australia's own Coptic community, facilitating access to its own traditions, and providing a research focus to complement Macquarie's new commitment to the teaching of the Coptic language and history. The resulting monograph will transform international scholarship on a key development of world civilisation.Read moreRead less
Proto Oceanic Language, culture and environment: Foundations of the Austronesian settlement of the Pacific. The project aims to reconstruct the lexicon of Proto Oceanic. Proto Oceanic was ancestral to most Austronesian languages of Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia. By paying attention to the semantics of terminologies, we expect to learn much about the culture, society and cosmology of Proto Oceanic speakers and their conception of and adaptation to the natural environment. The results will ....Proto Oceanic Language, culture and environment: Foundations of the Austronesian settlement of the Pacific. The project aims to reconstruct the lexicon of Proto Oceanic. Proto Oceanic was ancestral to most Austronesian languages of Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia. By paying attention to the semantics of terminologies, we expect to learn much about the culture, society and cosmology of Proto Oceanic speakers and their conception of and adaptation to the natural environment. The results will be presented in Volumes 3-5 of a five-volume series. Volume 1 was published in 1998; volume 2 is almost complete. This project will support fundamental research for volumes 3 (flora and fauna), 4 (people and society) and 5 (indices, etc).
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A Typological Study of the Sound Systems of the New Guinea-Melanesia Area. This project aims to complete the first detailed cross-linguistic study of the sound systems of the New Guinea Melanesia area. More than one quarter of the world's languages are spoken in this region which remains very little known from a linguistics perspective. Results of this study should have important ramifications for our understanding of: (1) the nature of languages in the region, and of language in general (2) ph ....A Typological Study of the Sound Systems of the New Guinea-Melanesia Area. This project aims to complete the first detailed cross-linguistic study of the sound systems of the New Guinea Melanesia area. More than one quarter of the world's languages are spoken in this region which remains very little known from a linguistics perspective. Results of this study should have important ramifications for our understanding of: (1) the nature of languages in the region, and of language in general (2) phonological description and theory (3) phonological description and theory (4) linguistic diffusion and influence in an area that extends from Eastern Timor to Vanuatu and New Caledonia.Read moreRead less
Reciprocals across languages. Reciprocity lies at the heart of social organization and human evolution. This project will examine how reciprocity is expressed, and what the different subtypes of reciprocal meaning are, by carrying out linguistic fieldwork on fifteen little-known languages of Australia and its region, making available detailed descriptions of reciprocals that until now have only been available for English and a few European languages. The fieldwork on undescribed, and in most cas ....Reciprocals across languages. Reciprocity lies at the heart of social organization and human evolution. This project will examine how reciprocity is expressed, and what the different subtypes of reciprocal meaning are, by carrying out linguistic fieldwork on fifteen little-known languages of Australia and its region, making available detailed descriptions of reciprocals that until now have only been available for English and a few European languages. The fieldwork on undescribed, and in most cases endangered, languages will be supplemented by a ground-breaking survey of how the various notions of reciprocity are expressed in languages around the world.Read moreRead less
The Old Zhuang Script: a Vernacular Character Script from Southern China. The Zhuang are a Tai-speaking people and the most populous of China's minority peoples. Traditionally they used a modified version of the Chinese character script. The aim of this project is to provide the wherewithal for a decipherment of the old Zhuang character script, to present evidence for the age of the script, and to describe the social and political conditions that gave it birth and influenced its development.
A typology of adverbial subordination and clause linkage in Tibeto-Burman languages. This project identifies and analyses the typological features of adverbial subordination and clause linkage in Tibeto-Burman languages and will establish the first typology of adverbial subordination in this underdocumented language family. A central component of the project involves linguistic fieldwork on poorly understood languages spoken in north-east India. Expected outcomes include a substantial typologi ....A typology of adverbial subordination and clause linkage in Tibeto-Burman languages. This project identifies and analyses the typological features of adverbial subordination and clause linkage in Tibeto-Burman languages and will establish the first typology of adverbial subordination in this underdocumented language family. A central component of the project involves linguistic fieldwork on poorly understood languages spoken in north-east India. Expected outcomes include a substantial typological monograph on adverbial subordination, plus grammatical descriptions that will pave the way for new research on the neglected Tibeto-Burman languages of Nagaland. This study will make a significant contribution to our understanding of the universal characteristics of clause linkage underpinning the organisation of human language.Read moreRead less
Linguistic Typology and the Demise of Morphological Case: The Development of the Genitive in the Germanic Languages. This project will investigate how changes to the case marking systems of the Germanic languages affected the expression of the relationships originally encoded by genitive case. New data will be gathered concerning changes in Dutch and English. The investigation will then be extended to the other Germanic languages. A primary aim of the project is to present a case study of how ....Linguistic Typology and the Demise of Morphological Case: The Development of the Genitive in the Germanic Languages. This project will investigate how changes to the case marking systems of the Germanic languages affected the expression of the relationships originally encoded by genitive case. New data will be gathered concerning changes in Dutch and English. The investigation will then be extended to the other Germanic languages. A primary aim of the project is to present a case study of how closely related languages can diverge significantly while undergoing a similar shift from one overall ?type? to another, adding to our understanding of what sort of changes the human language capability allows in the transmission of language across generations.Read moreRead less