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ALS Conference 2009 - Plenary Speakers
Co-hosted by RCLT and the Linguistics Program at La Trobe University
Three plenary speakers have been invited to the conference:
Professor Anne Cutler is one of four directors of the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, where she is responsible for work in the area of language comprehension. Before coming to Nijmegen in 1993 she had studied in Australia, Germany and the US, and had worked in the UK.
Her research centres on the recognition of spoken language, beginning with the role of rhythm and intonation in comprehension (her PhD); since these vary greatly across languages, this prompted her to cross-linguistic comparisons. Among the languages involved in her work in recent years have been Dutch, English, French, Japanese, Finnish, Koren, Cantonese, Spanish, Sesotho, Telugu and Arabic.
The central theme of her research is how adult processing of spoken language is exquisitely adapted to suit the native language, making for great efficiency in listening to the native language, but difficulty in listening to structurally different foreign languages.
Variation induces native listening
Babies acquire whatever language is spoken around them. Languages differ considerably, including in the listening strategies they encourage; accordingly, the process of listening to speech is tailored during language acquisition to the requirements of the mother tongue, and adult listeners are as a result native listeners, specialised for language-specific input.
Prof. Alan Dench is a Winthrop Professor of Linguistics at the University of Western Australia. His principal area of expertise lies in the grammatical description of Australian Aboriginal languages, in particular the languages of Western Australia. He has published grammars of three languages of the Pilbara — Panyjima, Martuthunira and Yingkarta — and is working on a grammar of Nyamal. In addition to primary grammatical description he has made particular contributions to the historical and comparative analysis of Australian languages, and has written in the general area of ethno-linguistics. His work also includes contributions to studies of language contact.
Reconstructing morpho-syntactic change in the Pilbara languages of Western Australia
The presentation will give an overview of a continuing project: the comparative reconstruction of patterns of morpho-syntactic change in the languages of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Work on these languages has proceeded on a number of fronts, including reconstruction of the pronoun paradigm and demonstrative system, and the framing of hypotheses regarding changes in alignment (split-ergative to accusative). Planned future work extends to the comparative analysis and reconstruction of the verbal inflectional system.
This paper will present the results of the pronoun and demonstrative reconstructions. These include a catalogue of the (types of) diachronic processes operating in these morphological systems and a classification of the languages based on these results; distinguishing innovations arising from diffusion of pattern and form from those most likely due to shared inheritance. The paper will then turn to a discussion of the much more difficult problem of comparative reconstruction in the verb inflectional paradigm with a view to defining more closely the parameters of such a reconstruction.
Reconstruction of the pronoun paradigm is relatively uncomplicated. We have a good understanding of the broad typology of pronoun systems and of the categories represented there (person, number, gender, case …). Demonstrative systems are somewhat less straightforward, given the propensity for demonstratives to develop specialised uses beyond their primary exophoric deictic function and for the morpho-syntactic status of the class — or members of it — to shift (e.g. from demonstrative to pronoun, demonstrative to determiner …). Verb morphology is altogether more complex. Beyond the issue of identifying potentially cognate forms within and between languages, there is the difficulty of identifying related functions.
Verb inflections may code a selection of meanings within the domains of tense, aspect, modality, and evidentiality (TAME), as well as syntactic functions such as voice and hypotactic status. But it is not the inflectional system alone that contributes meanings in these domains. The bigger picture involves interaction between the inflectional categories of the verb, the lexical semantics of verb stems, temporal adverbs (and temporal adverbial phrases and clauses), clitic and particle elements coding TAME meanings, and the syntactic and wider discourse frames in which particular inflected verbs may occur.
To proceed with a comparative reconstruction we would like, ideally, to be able to work within a framework that maps semantic to morpho-syntactic interactions — much as we can work within a pronoun or demonstrative paradigm — and with a typology of likely paths of change. A detailed syntactic reconstruction (which ultimately must rely on a reconstruction of forms) including an account of the history of shifts in alignment, the innovation of voice alternations and of particular complex sentence constructions, may depend on such an understanding.
Dr. Alex François is a full-time researcher at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, more specifically with the team called LACITO, Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale. This is a team of approximately 40 linguists and anthropologists who for the last 40 years have endeavoured to document, describe, and analyse languages — especially endangered — from various parts of the world, including Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Dr. François has published descriptions of two languages of Vanuatu: Mwotlap (1800 speakers) and Araki (8 speakers), and done fieldwork on the Oceanic languages of north Vanuatu, as well as on the island of Vanikoro (eastern Solomons).
Local words, shared ideas: Lexical divergence and structural homogeneity among north Vanuatu languages
The small Torres and Banks islands of northern Vanuatu are impressive for their linguistic richness, with seventeen distinct languages for just 5,000 people. Depending on the perspective adopted, one may be impressed by the degree of formal heterogeneity that makes these languages so distinct, or by the functional similarities that unite them.
Genetically, these seventeen languages are all narrowly related, and historically they have been involved in ongoing cultural contact for centuries. Inter-island marriages have always been practised (Vienne 1984), and bilingualism with one's neighbours was generally the norm. However, despite the existence of such a social network defined by trade relations and cultural contacts for the whole Banks and Torres area, the situation one finds today is that of a mosaic of seventeen clearly distinct languages. Each of these is spoken by a small community of a few hundred speakers – sometimes much less – whose social life develops in relative independence from their neighbours. Rather than a matter of pure geography (the distance between two villages is sometimes less than half-a-day walking), this tendency towards cultural and linguistic differentiation reflects a behaviour that is socially encouraged in Melanesia (Thurston 1989, Ross 1998).
Seen from the individual's perspective, this twofold social ecology of northern Vanuatu island results in a form of cognitive conflict. On the one hand, each child grows up in a given community driven by a pressure towards cultural and linguistic differentiation from their neighbours. But the same individual is also caught, whether consciously or not, in a wider and deeper pattern of exchange and contact that also has a reality of its own, resulting in a contrary push towards cultural and linguistic similarity.
This particular social configuration has had complex effects on the modern languages. Despite being all clearly cognate, they do differ quite drastically in their phoneme inventories, in the details of their morphology, and more generally in the form of their grammatical or lexical words (their “lexification”, Grace 1981). These differences make them mutually unintelligible, and reflects historically the push towards heterogeneity. However, also impressive is the extreme degree of structural isomorphism one finds throughout this area: the semantic units that make up the grammars and lexicons appear to be narrowly parallel – with only a few exceptions – from one language to another. For example, all these languages have an aspect marker – formally very different from one language to the other – which can encode both future and immediate past, and is used in some focus constructions. This strong parallelism of structures is the result of an ongoing contact situation, and a constant pressure towards the full translatability of concepts (Gumperz 1971).
Overall, the contrast between the formal heterogeneity and the functional isomorphism of these languages reflects the two different scales of “linguistic community” individuals belong to: respectively, the narrow scale of one's specific community, and the wider scale of the archipelago's cultural and linguistic network.
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