Paul Black

Lexicostatistics with massive borrowing: The case of Jingulu and Mudburra

While heavy lexical borrowing can pose a problem to any approach to linguistic prehistory, it has often been regarded as an especially difficult problem for lexicostatistics, especially in such areas as Australia, where some believe that extensive borrowing is the norm. The present paper applies lexicostatistics to what is arguably the most massive case of borrowing known for Australia, namely between the Jingulu and Mudburra languages of the Northern Territory, and finds that it actually leads to what is generally considered the correct genetic classification of these languages. This result is then shown to depend on certain relationships among the lexicostatistical percentages that may not always obtain in other cases of heavy borrowing.

Listen to the Voice of Pre-service Teachers

This chapter introduces the significance, aims and development of a volume whose centrepiece is a collection of 31 chapters written by pre-service teachers on issues that they became aware of during their professional experience programs, or practicums. After explaining the purpose of the volume, notably to support less advanced pre-service teachers in preparing for the practicum, the chapter describes the structure of the book. The volume is divided into eight parts, the first consisting of four chapters of background relevant. Parts II to VII consisting of the 31 student chapters, and Part VIII consisting of a final chapter that comments on the student contributions and then looks into the problematic issue of how research might be used to foster teacher reflection and the changing world of teacher education.

Conclusion and What’s Next?

This chapter begins by reconsidering the 31 student contributions in Chaps. 5 to 35. They are interesting for three reasons, namely for what they chose to write about, what they chose to say about these things, and how they reached their conclusions. Here we are less interested in the merits of these conclusions, that is, how well informed and insightful they seem to be. They are not written by established specialists in the areas they deal with, but instead by novice teachers at the beginning of their paths towards mastering the intricacies of teaching and learning in school settings. After looking further into what these novice teachers are saying about the issues and how they draw their conclusions, we will then offer suggestions as to how the study represented by these papers help position these teachers for future learning and development in the course of their careers. In this regard one might hope there would be ways to further strengthen teachers’ abilities to research their own classrooms to provide a solid basis for critical reflections, but it seems clear that this cannot be guaranteed, so that the foundations for reflective teaching laid during pre-service education are particularly important.

Teachers as Reflective Practitioners

Pre-service teachers, as they progress through their education program, are confronted with a range of theories of learning, teaching strategies and educational philosophies, which they then have to balance with the real world of schools and the classrooms they experience during their practicum placements. This can be a time of stress and confusion. Learning the skills of critical reflection can help them make sense of the situations they face and helping them learn these skills during their course of study can set them on a path to become reflective teachers in their future careers. This is a long process, the benefits of which include helping them become more effective teachers, develop positive relationships and deliver better learning outcomes for the students they will teach. This chapter looks at why, how and what teachers should reflect on and how this is fostered during the pre-service years of teacher training. It leads into the 31 chapters written by our pre-service teachers which show their early reflections on issues they have encountered within their practicum experiences and their thinking about these issues as they work towards the start of their teaching careers.

The Rate of Lexical Change in Australia: Evidence from Larrakia

A paper by Barry Alpher compared earlier and later attestations of Australian languages in ways that may seem to suggest that lexical change in Australia could be unusually rapid, despite Alphers own disclaimers about the problematic nature of such evidence. The present paper first relates this possibility to recent work in lexically-based language classification and dating. It then proceeds to show that comparing earlier and later attestations of the Larrakia language, of the Darwin area, could also suggest rapid change if the attestations are considered individually, but that all evidence considered together suggests that the Larrakia lexicon was actually quite stable during this period. This casts doubts on what we might hope to learn about the rate of lexical change from comparisons of attestations of languages more poorly attested than Larrakia.

Comments on Jacques Guy's 'Lexicostatistics as Chess'

As chess is to warfare, lexicostatistics is not an attempt to represent all details of language change, but rather only lexical replacement. Unlike chess lexicostatistics is statistical rather than deterministic.