The building blocks of meaning: a linguistic approach. This project will investigate how complex meanings are built up from more basic building blocks, and to what extent basic meanings differ between different languages, cultures, and geographical zones. The project is expected to lead to significant advances in the scientific knowledge of language. Nothing comparable has been attempted before. Expected outcomes include a rich harvest of new knowledge, digital tools to assist with analysing and ....The building blocks of meaning: a linguistic approach. This project will investigate how complex meanings are built up from more basic building blocks, and to what extent basic meanings differ between different languages, cultures, and geographical zones. The project is expected to lead to significant advances in the scientific knowledge of language. Nothing comparable has been attempted before. Expected outcomes include a rich harvest of new knowledge, digital tools to assist with analysing and translating complex meanings, and ongoing international collaborations. This will provide significant benefits such as enabling messaging and communication in education, health care, service delivery and international affairs to be clearer, more accessible and more translatable.Read moreRead less
Australians and Americans talking: culture, interaction and communication style. No relationship is more important to Australia than our relationship with the United States of America, yet remarkably, there has been no systematic study of how Australians and Americans interact differently. This project identifies and explains these differences in a way that is rigorous, accessible, and useful to non-specialists.
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE170100026
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$312,000.00
Summary
A comparison of everyday and therapeutic talk. This project aims to equip therapists to support clients to overcome mental distress. Psychotherapy is an established approach for treating mental distress, but how therapy differs from supportive conversations with family or friends remains unclear. The project will use text analytic software and conversation analysis to identify therapeutic ways of discussing personal troubles and their association with therapeutic outcomes. Understanding this ass ....A comparison of everyday and therapeutic talk. This project aims to equip therapists to support clients to overcome mental distress. Psychotherapy is an established approach for treating mental distress, but how therapy differs from supportive conversations with family or friends remains unclear. The project will use text analytic software and conversation analysis to identify therapeutic ways of discussing personal troubles and their association with therapeutic outcomes. Understanding this association is expected to enable therapists to use communication practices that are most likely to benefit clients.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
Australian Laureate Fellowships - Grant ID: FL120100116
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$2,416,141.00
Summary
How gender shapes the world: a linguistic perspective. This project will seek to understand and explain gender roles in Australian society, and in nearby nations. Emphasis is placed on training researchers with an immigrant or minority background, working towards the empowerment of women researchers. This will enhance our nation's capacity to interpret and manage gender roles in multicultural contexts.
The integration of language and society. This project aims to seek associations between social and life-style differences and language structure. All human societies show pervasive similarities and all languages share recurrent features. Viewing society and language as an integrated whole, the project will study related groups in contrasting physical and social environments in PNG, Africa, East Asia, Amazonia and Australia. Inductive generalisations about associations between societal and langua ....The integration of language and society. This project aims to seek associations between social and life-style differences and language structure. All human societies show pervasive similarities and all languages share recurrent features. Viewing society and language as an integrated whole, the project will study related groups in contrasting physical and social environments in PNG, Africa, East Asia, Amazonia and Australia. Inductive generalisations about associations between societal and language parameters (e.g. varying techniques of address relating to articulated kin systems and social hierarchy) aim to provide insight into the human dynamic. Findings should benefit programmes for cultural awareness, language teaching and revitalisation and understanding of multicultural situations.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
Australian Aboriginal conversational style. This project aims to re-examine claims that Aboriginal Australians conduct conversations in different ways to Anglo-Australians. It will investigate and compare ordinary conversations in these groups on a large scale. The project expects to provide new evidence to explicate Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal conversational norms, pinpointing differences which may lead to intercultural miscommunication. Expected outcomes include endangered language documenta ....Australian Aboriginal conversational style. This project aims to re-examine claims that Aboriginal Australians conduct conversations in different ways to Anglo-Australians. It will investigate and compare ordinary conversations in these groups on a large scale. The project expects to provide new evidence to explicate Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal conversational norms, pinpointing differences which may lead to intercultural miscommunication. Expected outcomes include endangered language documentation, and evidence-based findings to disseminate to service providers, to communities and to Aboriginal organisations to improve ways of engaging with each other. In addition, the project will benefit Aboriginal communities with new approaches to language revitalisation.Read moreRead less
How languages differ and why. When languages interact, they become similar in certain ways. This project will explore the reasons for this, by examining why there are many languages of diverse structures in certain regions, focussing on New Guinea, Amazonia and north-east Queensland. The project will assist with understanding how language helps and hinders inter-ethnic communication.
The grammar of knowledge: a cross-linguistic view of evidentials and epistemological expressions. How does a speaker know that what they say is correct? Some languages have obligatory marking for stating 'information source' ('seen', 'inferred', or 'reported'). In others a source is optional - 'the (reported) theft'. This cross-linguistic investigation will advance our understanding of human interaction and the expression of knowledge.