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
Understanding communication about advance care planning across the lifespan. This project aims to understand how people communicate about advance care planning for children, adolescents, and adults. This project expects to generate new knowledge by using leading social scientific and linguistic methods to analyse real-world advance care planning conversations and documents. Expected outcomes include detailed knowledge about challenges people encounter in these conversations and how to manage the ....Understanding communication about advance care planning across the lifespan. This project aims to understand how people communicate about advance care planning for children, adolescents, and adults. This project expects to generate new knowledge by using leading social scientific and linguistic methods to analyse real-world advance care planning conversations and documents. Expected outcomes include detailed knowledge about challenges people encounter in these conversations and how to manage these challenges. Over 170,000 Australians die each year, most from serious illness. This project should provide significant benefits to future initiatives for enhancing communication about advance care planning, especially in relation to young Australians, older Australians, and Australians with disabilities.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
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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Linguistic analysis of Ngarrindjeri texts. The Ngarrindjeri language of the Lower Murray of South Australia was richly documented in the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The largest body of texts (163 texts in Berndt and Berndt, 1993) is a treasure-trove of language and cultural knowledge from the 1940s, but has received little linguistic attention, because of difficulties in interpreting writing conventions and because of the inadequate translations provided. Through systematic linguisti ....Linguistic analysis of Ngarrindjeri texts. The Ngarrindjeri language of the Lower Murray of South Australia was richly documented in the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The largest body of texts (163 texts in Berndt and Berndt, 1993) is a treasure-trove of language and cultural knowledge from the 1940s, but has received little linguistic attention, because of difficulties in interpreting writing conventions and because of the inadequate translations provided. Through systematic linguistic analysis and reconstructions, this project aims to shed light on how Ngarrindjeri changed over the 100 years since first documentation, how clan languages differed, and how Ngarrindjeri texts and sentences were structured. It is expected to provide important insight into the variation expected in language contact situations.Read moreRead less
The building blocks of language: Words in Central Australian languages. This project seeks to model the structure of words and phrases in three indigenous languages of of central Australia: Anmatyerr, Kaytetye, and Warumungu. The project will advance our understanding of the different ways that words and phrases function as the building blocks of language: how words vary in complexity, and the different ways that they combine to generate higher levels of linguistc structure. The project will pre ....The building blocks of language: Words in Central Australian languages. This project seeks to model the structure of words and phrases in three indigenous languages of of central Australia: Anmatyerr, Kaytetye, and Warumungu. The project will advance our understanding of the different ways that words and phrases function as the building blocks of language: how words vary in complexity, and the different ways that they combine to generate higher levels of linguistc structure. The project will preserve Indigenous language heritage and contribute to Indigenous cultural maintenance, a significant factor in advancing Indigenous well-being. The project will generate new insights into language structure that will advance linguistic theory, and inform language teaching and speech processing technologies.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE180101609
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$392,315.00
Summary
Telling the whole story in one sentence. This project aims to produce a framework for analysis of the ultra-long sentences that occur in hundreds of languages and to investigate the processing of these sentences by adults and children. Anticipated outcomes are enhanced models of language structure, mental processing of language, and brain functions. Understanding of drastically-different sentence types in the world’s languages will further benefit foreign language learners, machine translators, ....Telling the whole story in one sentence. This project aims to produce a framework for analysis of the ultra-long sentences that occur in hundreds of languages and to investigate the processing of these sentences by adults and children. Anticipated outcomes are enhanced models of language structure, mental processing of language, and brain functions. Understanding of drastically-different sentence types in the world’s languages will further benefit foreign language learners, machine translators, and immigrants learning English.Read moreRead less
Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment And Facilities - Grant ID: LE100100211
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$650,000.00
Summary
The Big Australian Speech Corpus: An audio-visual speech corpus of Australian English. Contemporary speech science and technology are driven by the availability of large speech corpora. While audio databases exist for languages spoken in America, Europe and Japan, there is currently no large auditory-visual database of spoken language, and certainly not one for Australian English. Here we will establish the Big Australian Speech Corpus, which will support a speech science research and developmen ....The Big Australian Speech Corpus: An audio-visual speech corpus of Australian English. Contemporary speech science and technology are driven by the availability of large speech corpora. While audio databases exist for languages spoken in America, Europe and Japan, there is currently no large auditory-visual database of spoken language, and certainly not one for Australian English. Here we will establish the Big Australian Speech Corpus, which will support a speech science research and development using Australian English and facilitate the development of Australian speech technology applications from automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis used in taxi and other ordering services, to hearing prostheses and talking head aids for learning-impaired children, and a range of security and forensic applications.Read moreRead less
A Social History of Australian English. This is a study of the development of attitudes towards Australian English in the period 1788 to 2000. It will demonstrate the significance of the growth of Australian English as a marker of national identity in the nineteenth century, the suppression of Australian English in the first half of the twentieth century, and the acceptance of Australian English in the second half of the twentieth century. The completed study, in the form of a book, will lead to ....A Social History of Australian English. This is a study of the development of attitudes towards Australian English in the period 1788 to 2000. It will demonstrate the significance of the growth of Australian English as a marker of national identity in the nineteenth century, the suppression of Australian English in the first half of the twentieth century, and the acceptance of Australian English in the second half of the twentieth century. The completed study, in the form of a book, will lead to a new understanding of the role Australian English has played in Australia's social, political, and cultural history.
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Extraordinary yet mundane talk: children navigating palliative care. This project aims to provide foundational evidence of how clinicians and families communicate effectively with children with life-limiting conditions. Finding ways to sensitively communicate with children about matters that will profoundly affect them will support the everyday work of skilled healthcare professionals. In developing the first nation-wide repository of video-recordings of paediatric palliative care consultations, ....Extraordinary yet mundane talk: children navigating palliative care. This project aims to provide foundational evidence of how clinicians and families communicate effectively with children with life-limiting conditions. Finding ways to sensitively communicate with children about matters that will profoundly affect them will support the everyday work of skilled healthcare professionals. In developing the first nation-wide repository of video-recordings of paediatric palliative care consultations, the project will generate new knowledge by using conversation analysis to examine how these conversations occur in real-life clinical settings. The project expects to inform research, policy, and practice, by revealing more effective communication approaches, benefiting researchers, clinicians, healthcare users, and policy makers.Read moreRead less