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
Reconstructing Australia’s linguistic past: Are all Australian languages related to one another? This project addresses a central question about Australia’s past. Are all the languages of Australia related, deriving from a common source language: Proto-Australian. The project will examine the implications of a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ answer for analyses of Australian prehistory, and for general analyses of human prehistory. The project involves extensive documentation of an endangered language Yanyuwa, ....Reconstructing Australia’s linguistic past: Are all Australian languages related to one another? This project addresses a central question about Australia’s past. Are all the languages of Australia related, deriving from a common source language: Proto-Australian. The project will examine the implications of a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ answer for analyses of Australian prehistory, and for general analyses of human prehistory. The project involves extensive documentation of an endangered language Yanyuwa, because of the significance of Yanyuwa data in deciding between a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ answer. The project will provide a descriptive grammar of Yanyuwa, a book evaluating the Proto-Australian hypothesis, and articles discussing the significance of the success or failure of the hypothesis for theories of the general human past.Read moreRead less
Howitt & Fison’s anthropology. Howitt & Fison’s anthropology. This project will systematically analyse nineteenth century anthropologists Lorimer Fison and A.W. Howitt’s accounts of Indigenous kinship, social organisation, and local languages, and historical encounters between settlers and Indigenous people. This project will assemble Fison and Howitt’s meticulous records into best-practice digital formats, with widely accessible interactive data presentation, and bring these extraordinary recor ....Howitt & Fison’s anthropology. Howitt & Fison’s anthropology. This project will systematically analyse nineteenth century anthropologists Lorimer Fison and A.W. Howitt’s accounts of Indigenous kinship, social organisation, and local languages, and historical encounters between settlers and Indigenous people. This project will assemble Fison and Howitt’s meticulous records into best-practice digital formats, with widely accessible interactive data presentation, and bring these extraordinary records to the broadest possible community. This research, which integrates anthropology, history and linguistics, is expected to open up new dimensions in Australian history, anthropological theory, and Australian linguistics.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.