Central Australian Linguistics Circle (CALC)
2007 Workshop
Date: Thursday 19 April 2007
Venue: CDU Alice Springs campus Building H, upstairs
Program
| Time | Title/topic | Presenter |
8.30am |
Language variation and change: a new mixed language emerges in the NT |
Carmel O’Shanessy |
9.00am |
Samantha Disbray | |
9.30am |
Literacy and social practice in the remote Aboriginal context | Inge Kral |
10.00am |
Indigenous Languages and Culture (ILC) in Central Australian Schools* |
Angela Harrison and Susan J Moore |
10.30am |
Morning Tea |
|
11.00am |
A history of the development of Australian phonology 1930-1960* |
David Moore |
11.30am |
What's up with /u/?* | Gavan Breen |
12.00pm |
Identifying adverbs in Anmatyerr | Gail Woods |
12.30pm |
Social and environmental indictors in some Arandic languages: preliminary notes | Myfany Turpin |
| 1.00pm | Lunch |
For further details, please email: myfturpin@netspace.net.au
Abstracts
Language variation and change: a new mixed language emerges in the NT
Carmal O'Shannessy
A new way of speaking, called Light Warlpiri, has emerged in the multilingual community of Lajamanu as a result of code-switching between its source languages, AE/Kriol and Warlpiri. The new way of speaking is best categorized as a Mixed Language, meaning that none of its source languages can be considered to be the sole parent language. Most verbs and the verbal morphology are from Aboriginal English or Kriol, while most nouns and the nominal morphology are from Warlpiri.
Children learn both the new language, Light Warlpiri, and the heritage language, Lajamanu Warlpiri. The two languages share lexical and grammatical properties, including ergative case-marking and flexible word order. Both adults and children distribute ergative marking differently in the two languages, but show similar word order patterns in both. The children show a stronger correlation between ergative marking and word order patterns than do the adults, suggesting that they are spearheading processes of language change.
Introducing referents: findings from a developmental study of discourse among children from Tennant Creek
Samantha Disbray, University of Melbourne
In this paper I present some findings from my PhD project, which is in progress. The thesis documents a developmental study of reference tracking in discourse by speakers of Wumpurrarni English (W.E), a variety of Northern Territory Creole. The study involves analysis of a set of narrative productions by children aged between five and twelve years of age. The children’s productions are based on a textless picture book known as ‘The frog story’ (Mayer 1969), a prompt which has been widely used to investigate children’s developing discourse ability (Bamberg 1987; Berman and Slobin 1994; Stromqvist and Verhoeven 2004).
This paper focuses on the ways that child speakers of different ages and a set of adult speakers introduce new characters in their narrations. The linguistic means available in Wumpurrarni English to signal information status (new or old information) in discourse are discussed, then the results of the developmental study detailed. The findings reveal developmental changes. For instance, children in the youngest group (five-six years) were more likely than older children to introduce referents as pronouns, creating ambiguous referents. Some interesting and unexpected findings also emerge with respect to code choice. Some children, especially those aged around ten years of age, chose to relate their narratives in very light W.E.. Analysis of these data show that the children use many Standard Australian English (S.A.E) features in this code style. The marking of referents as new, grammaticised in S.A.E. and expressed with the indefinite article ‘a/an’, however, is not a feature of this lighter style. Some implications for the acquisition of S.A.E. as a second language/dialect are flagged.
Indigenous Languages and Culture (ILC) in Central Australian Schools
Susan Moore & Angela Harrison, NT Department of Education Employment and Training
The presenters Angela Harrison and Susan Moore work with Indigenous staff in remote schools and communities to support Indigenous Languages and Culture programs in schools. These programs reflect the community’s desire for ILC to be taught in schools and the requirements of Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET).
This snapshot of Indigenous Languages and Culture Programs will illustrate the diversity of vibrant programs. The programs cater for multi-age, T-12 students and are taught by language speakers, assistant teachers and Indigenous teachers.
These programs have grown out of Indigenous communities determining the program outcomes. They highlight the collaboration of communities/schools, DEET, Batchelor College and linguists working with communities on L1 projects such as dictionaries to support the programs. ILC programs provide Professional Development for Indigenous educators who are the experts in their language and culture. This program is a way forward for Indigenous educators to lead in the classroom. Through this program we have seen capacity building of Indigenous educators as they drive the program and non-Indigenous educators as they learn about Indigenous languages and culture.
The presentation will provide an overview of the programs and an introduction to some of the resources being developed. The format will be a brief introduction to the project followed by a 20-minute multi media presentation and then 10 minute question and discussion time.
A history of the development of Australian phonology 1930-1960
David Moore, University of Western Australia
Phonetics developed in Australia in the early part of the twentieth century with the increasing use of the International Phonetic Alphabet to record increasingly slight sound distinctions. The development of the phoneme concept in Australian linguistics was primarily due to the adoption of the methods of American Structuralist linguistics. The use of the phoneme concept began in the 1950s but didn’t gain widespread acceptance until the 1960s.
This paper provides a brief overview of the three periods in the history of Australian linguistics based upon that of McGregor (forthcoming) and traces the development of phonology and its application to Australian languages. This paper will focus upon the work of linguists in the second period of Australian linguistics (1930-1960), particularly TGH Strehlow and WH Douglas. The second period of linguistics will be seen to be a transitional period between the work of early researchers and those of a fully autonomous discipline of linguistics.
What's up with /u/?
Gavan Breen, Institute for Aboriginal Development
For more than 30 years now I have grouped the columns in phoneme charts (for Aboriginal languages) into Peripheral (Labial plus Velar), Apical and Laminal (two columns in each for many languages). /w/ goes not under Labial nor Velar, but centrally under Peripheral. Sometimes I have put some other phonemes, such as rhotics or /y/ centrally too. For more than 25 years I have put the vowels in the same chart; /u/ goes under /w/, /i/ under /y/ and /a/ out on its own, under Open.
Some justification of the grouping can be found in Dixon (1980, 2002). Blake and I did a somewhat similar thing in ‘The Pitta-Pitta dialects’ (1971). What I am proposing to do here is add to the justification by listing some oddities about /u/. It easily turns into [w] or roundness. The best example is from Arandic, of course. Dixon mentions metathesis rules by which u before a consonant becomes w after it (and similar for i). Phonetic rounding of a velar in the environment uCa is probably widespread. There are several types of examples from Wakaya, which has two dialects, a western one with noun classes marked in many words with final /i/ ‘non-masculine’ and /u/ ‘masculine’ while the eastern has no noun classes and these words all end in /u/. But sometimes the western word ends in /wi/ instead of /i/. Thus marnngwi ‘dream’ instead of expected *marnngi corresponding to eastern marnngu. (These give rise to the only CCC clusters in the language.)
Identifying adverbs in Anmatyerr
Gail Woods
The traditional part of speech ‘adverb’ has arisen out of the grammatical description of European languages, dating back to the time of Dionysius Thrax, and even then it has not always been satisfactory given the many different kinds of adverbs or sub-sets of adverbs that exist in the world's languages. There is a commonly held perception that the adverb class acts as a kind of ‘rubbish bin’ class for the left over words once all else has been assigned to syntactic categories.
There is wide variation of analyses of adverbial notions and the word classes involved for Australian languages resulting in categories such as active adjectives, manner nominals, action nominals, temporal and locational 'words', temporal and spatial qualifiers, adverbs, particles, preverbs and coverbs.
Within the Arandic group of languages the methods employed for the classification of adverbs lack consistency. There is a sense that 'adverb' entries have been decided upon in a rather ad hoc manner resulting in items exhibiting characteristics pertaining to the nominal, adverb and particle classes. In this paper I make a case for the existence of adverbs as a major word class in Anmatyerr and provide a set of morpho-syntactic criteria for defining membership.
