Simon Musgrave

The use of databases in cross-linguistic studies

This book promotes the development of linguistic databases by describing a number of successful database projects, focusing especially on cross-linguistic and typological research. It has become increasingly clear that ready access to knowledge about cross-linguistic variation is of great value to many types of linguistic research. Such a systematic body of data is essential in order to gain a proper understanding of what is truly universal in language and what is determined by specific cultural settings. Moreover, it is increasingly needed as a tool to systematically evaluate contrasting theoretical claims. The book includes a chapter on general problems of using databases to handle language data and chapters on a number of individual projects.

Pronouns and morphology: undergoer subject clauses in Indonesian

Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) has a variety of transitive clause patterns in which the less agent-like argument is the syntactic subject, termed here undergoer subject clause types1. These fall into two general types. In the first type, the verb root has the morpheme di- prefixed to it and the actor occurs post-verbally. There are three possibilities for the realisation of the actor: an attached pronoun, a bare noun phrase which must be adjacent to the verb, or a prepositional phrase headed by oleh ‘by’ which can be separated from the verb:2,3

Language Shift and Language Maintenance in Indonesia

Indonesia is a large nation in terms of both geography and population, and a very large number of languages are spoken within its territory. Historically, multilingualism was and is the norm in many parts of the archipelago, and common even in areas where one language dominates. The emergence of a unitary state with a national language after World War II has exerted pressure towards greater uniformity, but the shifts which are taking place are best viewed as changing patterns of multilingualism, rather than as shifts of large populations from one language to another. Such shifts in patterns of language use are occurring throughout the nation, and are resulting in threats to the viability of some languages, especially in the eastern part of the archipelago where there are many languages with small speaker populations. The size of the language groups in the east also has consequences for language maintenance. Although official policy recognizes the right of different language groups to maintain their languages and cultures, resources for such activities are scarce and the large ethnolinguistic communities in the west, where several languages have speaker numbers in the millions, have been more successful in accessing resources and institutional support which assist language maintenance. In contrast, speaker groups in the eastern part of Indonesia have limited access to resources available for language maintenance, although recent funding initiatives by organizations based in Europe have at least assisted in drawing attention to the problems faced in that region.

Minority language speakers as migrants: some preliminary observations on the Sudanese community in Melbourne

The language problems faced by migrants may be more complex when they come from a minority language group in their homeland. The new arrivals may find that there are few, or even no, speakers of their language in the community to which they have moved. Then decisions have to be made as to whether to attempt to maintain the native language and also whether to join in larger groupings of people from the country of origin, groups that may use dominant languages of the home country or other languages of wider communication. Such migrants can be expected to be involved in various networks based on different languages and to have complex allegiances and identities involving the various networks and languages. We explore these issues by considering the case of speakers of minority languages from Sudan who have settled in Melbourne. More than 40 languages are represented in this community and most of these are minority languages in Sudan. We present three case studies of members of this community and discuss the social networks that are available to speakers of these languages and the various factors that influence the language use and language choices of the people from these groups.

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.

Migration and multilingualism: focus on Melbourne

This special issue of the journal is dedicated to the memory of Michael Clyne. The papers published here were originally presented at a roundtable organised by the Language and Society Centre at Monash University, a research centre founded by Michael. They present research on topics which occupied Michael throughout his career: the language use of migrants in Australia, the behaviour of multilingual individuals and the nature of multilingual interactions. The papers all draw on research conducted in the city of Melbourne, Michaels home for most of his life. We hope that this close alignment between the research published here and Michaels interests ensures an appropriate tribute to the work of a distinguished scholar and an esteemed colleague.

Accessing Phonetic Variation in Spoken Language Corpora through Non-standard Orthography

Much of the sociolinguistic and stylistic variation which is of interest to linguists is phonetic in nature, but the access route to corpus data is typically via a textual transcription. This poses a significant problem for a researcher who wishes to access the original recordings of speech in order to analyse variation: how can they search for relevant data? Many transcription traditions allow for the representation of such variation through non-standard orthography, and such conventions should therefore allow access to data relevant to the study of variation. However, the specific conventions used vary between traditions (and indeed may not be applied consistently by individual transcribers). This then creates another problem where the researcher wishes to access data across an aggregated collection, which is a practical necessity given the relatively limited size of most corpora of spoken language. In this paper, we analyse the conventions used in two of the component collections in the Australian National Corpus, the Australian Radio Talkback Corpus and the Monash Corpus of Spoken English. On the basis of this analysis, we develop a fragment of an ontology which gives an explicit account of the phenomena related to non-standard pronunciation represented in the transcripts and which can therefore act as the basis for better searching of the collections and better access to relevant data for analysing sociolinguistic and stylistic variation.

Improving Access to Recorded Language Data

This article discusses the work of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Language Codes Working Group, which is addressing the problem of how scientists can discover data from various research areas that is managed by different disciplinary approaches and standards. The WG is addressing standardisation of metadata elements in two areas: codes for identification of languages and language varieties, and categories for describing the content of resources. The goal is to deliver metadata components that can be used by archives across disciplines which address these two areas, using descriptors linked to a registry of data categories to ensure transparency and consistency and lead to improved discovery and access for researchers across disciplines.

The typological database of the World Atlas of Language Structures

The World Atlas of Language Structures (often abbreviated as WALS) is primarily a book with 142 world maps showing the global distribution of structural features of language. It was put together by Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology between 1999 and 2004, and published by Oxford University Press in July 2005 (Haspelmath et al. 2005). Over forty authors contributed to it, each structural feature (and thus each map) being the responsibility of a single author or team of authors. A sample map is shown in Figure 1.