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
Ethnopragmatics: A fresh approach to studying discourse practices in cultural context. Thhis project applies an innovative and rigorous linguistic framework to the study of culturally-shaped ways of speaking, using case studies of Malay, Australian English, and several other languages. Cultural differences in ways of speaking - e.g. a tolerance of sarcasm, a preference for subtlety or for directness or for hyperbole - run deep and cause much intercultural misunderstanding. They are usually deepl ....Ethnopragmatics: A fresh approach to studying discourse practices in cultural context. Thhis project applies an innovative and rigorous linguistic framework to the study of culturally-shaped ways of speaking, using case studies of Malay, Australian English, and several other languages. Cultural differences in ways of speaking - e.g. a tolerance of sarcasm, a preference for subtlety or for directness or for hyperbole - run deep and cause much intercultural misunderstanding. They are usually deeply rooted in societal atitudes and cultural assumptions. The findings will have important implications for intercultural communication (both within a multicultural Australia, and in trade and international relations) and for the teaching of languages in cultural context.Read moreRead less
Lexical typology, a new integrated approach to semantics: a reciprocal case study. This proposal will bring out Professor Leila Behrens (U. Cologne), one of the co-founders of a new approach to linguistics, Lexical Typology, which looks at how all of a language's expressive components interact, instead of just focussing on one element such as grammar or vocabulary. With the CI she will develop this theory further, with respect to the expression of reciprocal relationships in English, German, Hun ....Lexical typology, a new integrated approach to semantics: a reciprocal case study. This proposal will bring out Professor Leila Behrens (U. Cologne), one of the co-founders of a new approach to linguistics, Lexical Typology, which looks at how all of a language's expressive components interact, instead of just focussing on one element such as grammar or vocabulary. With the CI she will develop this theory further, with respect to the expression of reciprocal relationships in English, German, Hungarian, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and the Australian Aboriginal languages Kayardild, Bininj Gun-wok and Dalabon.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.
Stories around a sand space: multimodal interaction in Central Australian Aboriginal sand drawing narratives. Central Australian Aboriginal sand stories are a unique form of storytelling that incorporates speech, song, gesture, signs and drawn graphic symbols. This project will enhance our understandings of these narrative traditions and provide insights into the complexities of multimodal communicative systems as they are used in day-to-day interactions.
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.