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
Unlocking the missing Millennia of mainland Southeast Asia. This project will reveal the prehistoric transition from Neolithic to Bronze Age in South and Southeast Asia, the missing Millennia of the archaeological record. Sophisticated linguistic analyses, facilitated by innovative computational methods and bioinformatics, reconstruct the languages, migrations, and societies of the region’s oldest cultures
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.
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
Understanding human history in Asia through linguistic analysis. This project aims to advance understanding of Australia's position in Asia and stimulate the research culture in linguistics. New research methodologies will advance knowledge and improve Australia's research skill base. Sharing expertise will strengthen institutional ties between Australia and its neighbours.
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.
Languages in Deep Time: the Papuan languages of Island Melanesia and their wider relationships. With its natural focus on the islands of the Southwest Pacific, and the associated mainland of New Guinea, the project has particular relevance for the understanding of the origins of our nearest neighbours. It is envisaged that the results of this project will generate considerable interest outside specialist circles, demonstrating Australian achievements in science on the international stage.
Linguistic prehistory in Mainland Southeast Asia: 2000 years of language and culture contact between Austroasiatic and Chamic speakers. The project focuses on the Austroasiatic language groups, Bahnaric, Katuic and Khmer, and one Austronesian, Chamic, which are located in Vietnam, Cambodia and southern Laos. These languages have been in contact for around 2000 years. I will investigate the history of language contact and change, leading to improved understanding of the particular and general pro ....Linguistic prehistory in Mainland Southeast Asia: 2000 years of language and culture contact between Austroasiatic and Chamic speakers. The project focuses on the Austroasiatic language groups, Bahnaric, Katuic and Khmer, and one Austronesian, Chamic, which are located in Vietnam, Cambodia and southern Laos. These languages have been in contact for around 2000 years. I will investigate the history of language contact and change, leading to improved understanding of the particular and general processes involved, and the histories of the languages and their speakers. Outcomes will include improved reconstructions of proto-languages, papers describing in detail the typology and processes of language contact and change, and a substantial monograph on the (pre)history of Mainland Southeast Asia.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
The languages of Southern New Guinea. This project will investigate, analyse and record the barely-known languages of Southern New Guinea, stretching across Papua New Guinea and Indonesia just kilometres from Australia's borders. It will produce grammatical descriptions for ten of the thirty languages of the area, plus a comparative database and handbook of the languages of this strategic region.