Sustainable Data from Digital Fieldwork

Conference held at the University of Sydney.

• Conference page is here.
• Conference review at ELAC.
• DSpace collection of papers resulting from the workshop.

Structure and Variation in Language Contact

Structure and variation in langu contact, edited by Ana Deumert and Stephanie Durrleman

This volume presents a careful selection of fifteen articles presented at the SPCL meetings in Atlanta, Boston and Hawai’i in 2003 and 2004. The contributions reflect – from various perspectives and using different types of data – on the interplay between structure and variation in contact languages, both synchronically and diachronically. The contributors consider a wide range of languages, including Surinamese creoles, Chinook Jargon, Yiddish, AAVE, Haitian Creole, Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Portuguese varieties, Nigerian Pidgin, Sri Lankan Malay, Papiamentu, and Bahamian Creole English. A need to question and test existing claims regarding pidginization/creolization is evident in all contributions, and the authors provide analyses for a variety of grammatical structures: VO-ordering and affixation, agglutination, negation, TMAs, plural marking, the copula, and serial verb constructions. The volume provides ample evidence for the observation that pidgin/creole studies is today a mature subfield of linguistics which is making important contributions to general linguistic theory.

The link includes the table of contents. No papers specifically on Australian languages but certainly of general interest.

Wulguru

Salvage study of the language historically spoken around Townsville, by Mark Donohue.

Linguistlist book announcement is here, and includes the following blurbː

Wulguru was a Pama-Nyungan language typical of the sort found on the northeast coast of Australia; it ceased to be spoken before it was properly documented. Wulguru was spoken in the area around present day Townsville, and also on the islands extending out to Palm Island.

The sketch that is presented here has been assembled from the available data, based mainly on a journal kept by Charles Price, a resident of Townsville in the late 19th century; the current work is as complete a record as we are likely to have.

Wulguru had a vowel-length distinction; as a result of initial consonant loss, vowels could begin words; further, there were monosyllabic words. Wulguru marked syntactic relations by means of case marking; the ergative showed allomorphy based on syllable count as well as final consonant identity. There were at least three different verbal conjugations, possibly as many as five or six. Verbal agreement was optional, though this might represent second position clitics. The only textual material consists of a few short phrases, as well as the transcription of some songs, and the main text that we have for Wulguru, a translation of The Lord’s Prayer. It becomes apparent (after back-translation) that it was not Price himself who assembled the prayer translation, but probably a Wulguru speaker who makes a secret cry against the white invasion of the area.

The link includes a link to the publisher, but their “new books” link doesn’t seem to work at present.

Ethnography of Kinship

Speaking Kunjen : An ethnography of Oykangand kinship and communication, by Bruce Sommer

Linguistlist book announcementː

This book examines the interface between language and kinship in the Australian Aboriginal language Kunjen which is spoken in the Cape York region of northern Queensland. The author shows that kinship relations play a major role in determining the kinds of linguistic interactions that are appropriate for different groups of individuals. The social meaning of utterances depends more than anything else on kinship and one’s kin relations with those one communicates with. The rules of interpretation used by Kunjen speakers to mediate kinship and language are as complex and as pervasive as the grammatical rules of the language itself, and help to reveal aspects of linguistic structure that might not otherwise be obvious. Conversely, kinship structures can be illuminated, if not revealed, by the study of language use.

(Note that book URL of http://www.pacling.com/catalogue/582.html doesn’t work at present).

Theses on Indigenous Studies

from the University of Tromso, an archive of Theses on Indigenous Studies, including some on language.