Change in language, culture and identity in a small isolated speech community: Palmerston Island English. This project will investigate language variation and change through a case study of Palmerston Island, a small, isolated community in the Cook Islands, where a new dialect of English has developed. The relationship between social networks, cultural identity and linguistic variation will be explored.
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
A longitudinal study of the interaction of home and school language in three Aboriginal communities. The importance of language skills cannot be underestimated, and contribute to 'a healthy start to life'. In multilingual Indigenous communities, children must negotiate the complexities of different languages used for different purposes. This project will provide detailed insights into how children manage differences between home and school language, the kinds of problems they encounter when the ....A longitudinal study of the interaction of home and school language in three Aboriginal communities. The importance of language skills cannot be underestimated, and contribute to 'a healthy start to life'. In multilingual Indigenous communities, children must negotiate the complexities of different languages used for different purposes. This project will provide detailed insights into how children manage differences between home and school language, the kinds of problems they encounter when they enter the school system, and how their languages develop over the first four crucial years of school which provide the foundation for the children's future education. Their ability to manage the language of school underpins their ability to lead successful and engaged lives as adults. Read moreRead less
The Semantics of Canonical Parallelism: Oral composition among Rotinese poets, eastern Indonesia. The pairing of words, known in linguistics as parallelism, is a critical feature of the oral traditions of the world. This strict use of couplets for oral compositions is a characteristic of the vibrant traditions of verbal communication on all the islands of eastern Indonesia. This project focuses on the oral traditions of the island of Roti, Australia's closest Indonesian neighbour. Using new anal ....The Semantics of Canonical Parallelism: Oral composition among Rotinese poets, eastern Indonesia. The pairing of words, known in linguistics as parallelism, is a critical feature of the oral traditions of the world. This strict use of couplets for oral compositions is a characteristic of the vibrant traditions of verbal communication on all the islands of eastern Indonesia. This project focuses on the oral traditions of the island of Roti, Australia's closest Indonesian neighbour. Using new analytic techniques applied to an extensive recorded corpus, it seeks to identify underlying mechanisms of verbal composition that may be applied comparatively to other oral traditions throughout the world, thus locating Australia at the forefront of the international study of oral traditions.Read moreRead less
Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment And Facilities - Grant ID: LE0560711
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$325,873.00
Summary
PARADISEC, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures: Accessibility and Decentralisation. PARADISEC, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures, is a collaborative facility established in 2003 to preserve and make accessible Australian researchers' field recordings of endangered languages and musics from the area around Australia. Improvement plans for 2005 include: decentralising audio ingestion; adding audio restoration capabil ....PARADISEC, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures: Accessibility and Decentralisation. PARADISEC, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures, is a collaborative facility established in 2003 to preserve and make accessible Australian researchers' field recordings of endangered languages and musics from the area around Australia. Improvement plans for 2005 include: decentralising audio ingestion; adding audio restoration capabilities; developing a geographical interface to our collection; web-publishing our catalogue; developing and testing protocols for linking audio with text, images and relevant material in other collections; and participating in international consortia developing standards and tools for management of and access to endangered cultural recordings. Read moreRead less
Reconstructing Eastern Himalayan Histories: languages, plants, and people. This project combines linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork to produce documentations of Bhutan's East-Bodish (Tibeto-Burman) speaking peoples, with an ultimate aim to reconstruct the social history of this group. The linguistic fieldwork will focus on different semantic domains, including religion, agriculture, and ethnobotany and grammatical features as different lenses into the past. The anthropological research will b ....Reconstructing Eastern Himalayan Histories: languages, plants, and people. This project combines linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork to produce documentations of Bhutan's East-Bodish (Tibeto-Burman) speaking peoples, with an ultimate aim to reconstruct the social history of this group. The linguistic fieldwork will focus on different semantic domains, including religion, agriculture, and ethnobotany and grammatical features as different lenses into the past. The anthropological research will bring new ethnographic light in to supplement the linguistic picture of the past, including religious practices and social organisation. Situated squarely within the eastern Himalayas, this project will provide new and crucial insights into the prehistory of Asia.Read moreRead less
Australian Laureate Fellowships - Grant ID: FL130100111
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$3,163,655.00
Summary
The wellsprings of linguistic diversity. A quarter of the world's languages are spoken in our region. This project tackles the riddle of why there are so many languages in parts of the world like Australia and New Guinea, and so few in others. Understanding the causes of language diversity will help the countries and communities in our region maintain their rich linguistic heritage.
Waves of words: mapping and modeling Australia’s Pacific ties. This project aims to determine the extent and nature of ancient contact relationships between first peoples of Australia and the Pacific by exploring linguistic interactions. The project will use complementary sets of methods and expects to discover what kinds of social configurations underlie different linguistic outcomes in language contact situations. This will improve our understanding of the relationship between language change ....Waves of words: mapping and modeling Australia’s Pacific ties. This project aims to determine the extent and nature of ancient contact relationships between first peoples of Australia and the Pacific by exploring linguistic interactions. The project will use complementary sets of methods and expects to discover what kinds of social configurations underlie different linguistic outcomes in language contact situations. This will improve our understanding of the relationship between language change and socio-cultural change, which will have significant impact on linguistic and anthropological theory.Read moreRead less
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
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE220100785
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$453,679.00
Summary
Addressing the challenge of communicating uncertainty in diagnosis. This project aims to examine the critical role and impact of communication on the diagnostic process in health settings. Uncertainty in communication is pervasive in healthcare. Little is known about how health policy and practice affect linguistic expressions of uncertainty. This research expects to generate new knowledge of the influence of communication on the delivery of health services. Expected outcomes include practical c ....Addressing the challenge of communicating uncertainty in diagnosis. This project aims to examine the critical role and impact of communication on the diagnostic process in health settings. Uncertainty in communication is pervasive in healthcare. Little is known about how health policy and practice affect linguistic expressions of uncertainty. This research expects to generate new knowledge of the influence of communication on the delivery of health services. Expected outcomes include practical communication strategies, advanced research methods in misdiagnosis, and enhanced research capacity in the health community. This should provide significant social, health and economic benefits by informing policy changes, and improving diagnostic communication and health services efficiency.Read moreRead less