Nicholas Thieberger

Language maintenance: why bother?

This is a publisher’s version of an article published in Multilingua 1990 published by Walter de Gruyter. This version is reproduced with permission from Walter de Gruyter. www.reference-global.com

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.

The benefactive construction in South Efate

The benefactive construction in South Efate employs a prepositional phrase in the position immediately preceding the main verb. This position facilitates the expression of an additional participant in a sentence without competing for slots held by other participants (core arguments or adjuncts). Possessive morphology encoding the benefactive has been noted for other Oceanic languages, with distinct word-order marking a final stage of grammaticalization of the benefactive. While South Efate shares features with southern Vanuatu languages, it is shown that a preverbal benefactive is an areal feature of several languages to the north of South Efate, potentially supporting South Efates position in the Central Vanuatu subgroup.

Assessing Annotated Corpora as Research Output

The increasing importance of language documentation as a paradigm in linguistic research means that many linguists now spend substantial amounts of time preparing digital corpora of language data for long-term access. Benefits of this development include: (i) making analyses accountable to the primary material on which they are based; (ii) providing future researchers with a body of linguistic material to analyse in ways not foreseen by the original collector of the data; and, equally importantly, (iii) acknowledging the responsibility of the linguist to create records that can be accessed by the speakers of the language and by their descendants. Preparing such data collections requires substantial scholarly effort, and in order to make this approach sustainable, those who undertake it need to receive appropriate academic recognition of their effort in relevant institutional contexts. Such recognition is especially important for early-career scholars so that they can devote efforts to the compilation of annotated corpora and to making them accessible without damaging their careers in the long-term by impacting negatively on their publication record. Preliminary discussions between the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) and the Australian Research Council (ARC) made it clear that the ARC accepts that curated corpora can legitimately be seen as research output, but that it is the responsibility of the ALS (and the scholarly community more generally) to establish conventions to accord scholarly credibility to such research products. This paper reports on the activities of the authors in exploring this issue on behalf of the ALS and it discusses issues in two areas: (a) what sort of process is appropriate in according acknowledgment and validation to curated corpora as research output; and (b) what are the appropriate criteria against which such validation should be judged? While the discussion focuses on the Australian linguistic context, it is also more broadly applicable as we will present in this article.

Daniel Macdonald and the "Compromise Literary Dialect" in Efate, Central Vanuatu

Daniel Macdonald, a Presbyterian Church of Victoria missionary to the New Hebrides from 1872 to 1905, developed a particularly strong interest in language. A prodigious author, he published widely and at length on the languages of Efate, and especially those of the Havannah Harbour area where he was stationed. But if his work is recalled today, it is as something of a curio, both for his insistence—archaic even for the times—on a link between ancient Semitic and Efate, and for his vigorous promotion of the use by the mission and its converts of a single, hybrid Efate language. This paper addresses and seeks to analyze what Macdonald himself called this “compromise literary dialect.” By identifying distinctive features of the three main varieties of Efate languages known today (Nguna or Nakanamanga, South Efate, and Lelepa), we aim to move beyond the lexical comparisons that have been the sole means of gauging relationships among these languages thus far. This enables us to begin the process of investigating the claim of Captain Rason, British Deputy Commissioner for the New Hebrides during Macdonald’s last years on Efate, that the “compromise literary dialect” was in fact a spoken dialect particular to the area of Havannah Harbour. We hope to reconsider and perhaps recuperate some of Macdonald’s writing as a rare if often distorted window on indigenous life and language at a pivotal moment in the transformation of Efate communities.

From Small to Big Data: paper manuscripts to RDF triples of Australian Indigenous Vocabularies

This paper discusses a project to encode archival vocabularies of Australian indigenous languages recorded in the early twentieth century and representing at least 40 different languages. We explore the text with novel techniques, based on encoding them in XML with a standard TEI schema. This project allows geographic navigation of the diverse vocabularies. Ontologies for people and placenames will provide further points of entry to the data, and will allow linking to external authority. The structured data has also been converted to RDF to build a linked data set. It will be used to calculate a Levenshtein distance between wordlists.

Developing collection management tools to create more robust and reliable linguistic data

Lack of adequate descriptive metadata remains a major barrier to accessing and reusing language documentation. A collection management tool could facilitate management of linguistic data from the point of creation to the archive deposit, greatly reducing the archiving backlog and ensuring more robust and reliable data.

What remains to be done—Exposing invisible collections in the other 7,000 languages and why it is a DH enterprise

For most of the world’s 7,000 languages, there are few records available via the Internet. Recognizing this digital divide and the consequential underrepresentation of most languages in any linked open data efforts is a motivation for some solutions offered in this article. Efforts to increase the documentation of the world’s small languages have led to the development of tools and repositories over the past decade. However, as not all digital language archives currently provide metadata in standard formats, their collections are invisible to aggregated searches. Other repositories (including many institutional repositories—national libraries and archives, mission archives, and so on) have language content that is not noted in the collection’s catalog, so is impossible to locate at all via a search based on language names. Finally, there are collections still held by their creators and not in a repository at all, completely hidden from other potential users. This article suggests that it is a digital humanities project to make more information about the world’s small languages more freely available, and identifies several means by which this could be accomplished, including a survey to locate more collections; a register to announce their existence; and a documentation index to provide an overview of what is known for each language.

The lexicography of indigenous languages in Australia and the Pacific

The Australia and Pacific region is home to nearly a quarter of the world’s languages.Wordlists of a few of these languages date back to the first European explorers, while detailed dictionaries have been prepared for somewhere less than 5 % of them. Where an indigenous language is the official language of a country of this region it is more likely to have a dictionary and ongoing administrative support for lexicographic work, and, in a few cases, a corpus from which terms can be sourced. For most indigenous languages dictionaries are prepared in the course of language documentation efforts by researchers from outside of the speech community, using modern lexicographic database tools and resulting in structured lexicons. As a result, it is possible to produce various output formats of these dictionaries, including print-on-demand, multimodal webpages, and mobile devices as increasingly popular methods of delivery. A major use of these dictionaries can be to support vernacular language programs in schools. This region was a test bed for computational bilingual lexicography, and is home to the two largest comparative lexical databases of indigenous languages.

Mood and Transitivity in South Efate

South Efate, an Oceanic language of central Vanuatu, allows the expression of temporal relations in several ways using markers of aspect and mood. Pronominal expression of arguments is obligatory and, as subject proclitics occur in one of three forms (realis, irrealis, and perfect), expression of aspect or mood is required in every sentence. South Efate is one of a group of Vanuatu languages that displays stem-initial mutation, whereby the initial consonant of a very small group of verbs changes to reflect mood. This paper presents evidence that fortis (realis) and lenis (irrealis) stem mutation also correlates with features of transitivity, not a surprising finding following the work of Hopper and Thompson. All else being equal, the fortis form of the verb occurs in clauses that have an overt expression of an object, while the lenis form occurs when there is no object in the clause. A further curiosity is that stem-initial mutation has been maintained for just a small class of verbs, so its correlation with transitivity in just this small class is all the more interesting. This paper explores the relationship between the morphological expression of mood and transitivity in South Efate, and suggests frequency of use as an explanation for the retention of this marginal system that affects only 7 percent of verb stems in the lexicon.