Lauren Gawne

Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field

Abstract This paper is a position statement on reproducible research in linguistics, including data citation and attribution, that represents the collective views of some 41 colleagues. Reproducibility can play a key role in increasing verification and accountability in linguistic research, and is a hallmark of social science research that is currently under-represented in our field. We believe that we need to take time as a discipline to clearly articulate our expectations for how linguistic data are managed, cited, and maintained for long-term access.

Vowels in Wunambal, a Language of the North West Kimberley Region

This paper presents an acoustic-phonetic analysis of vowel data from recordings of Wunambal, a Worrorran language of the Kimberley region in North West Australia. Wunambal has been analysed as a six vowel system with the contrasts /i e a o u ɨ/, with /ɨ/ only found in the Northern variety. Recordings from three senior (60+) male speakers of Northern Wunambal were used for this study. These recordings were originally made for documentation of lexical items. All vowel tokens were drawn from words in short carrier phrases, or words in isolation, and we compare vowels from both accented and unaccented contexts. We demonstrate a remarkably symmetrical vowel space, highlighting where the six vowels lie acoustically in relation to each other for the three speakers overall, and for each speaker individually. While all speakers in our corpus used the /ɨ/ vowel, the allophony observed suggests that it has a somewhat different phonemic status than other vowels. Accented and unaccented vowels are not significantly different for any speaker, and are similarly distributed in acoustic space.

Revisiting Significant Action and Gesture Categorization

As the field of gesture studies has developed researchers have created ways of analysing and categorizing bodily movement phenomena. In this paper we look at whether gesture categorizations have any resonance with the ways that people other than gesture researchers approach bodily movement. Building on Kendons observations that people generally have a consistent attitude towards what constitutes ‘significant action’, we asked 12 participants to conceptualize their own categories of gesture and then analyse a short video that contained a predetermined variety of bodily movements. We found that non-analysts had a wider conception of what constituted gesture than analysts. In regards to the categorizations of gesture that non-analysts made, there were a range of schemas, which we broadly categorized as being ‘form-based’ and ‘function-based’.