Body, Language and Socialisation across Cultures. This project aims to advance the understanding of how people learn languages, and in the process become socialized into particular cultures and communities. To that end, it will bring together an international team of leading experts in the field, and focus in new ways on the interplay of speech and sign with other bodily forms of communication in a wide variety of cultures. Expected outcomes include improved understanding of multimodal communica ....Body, Language and Socialisation across Cultures. This project aims to advance the understanding of how people learn languages, and in the process become socialized into particular cultures and communities. To that end, it will bring together an international team of leading experts in the field, and focus in new ways on the interplay of speech and sign with other bodily forms of communication in a wide variety of cultures. Expected outcomes include improved understanding of multimodal communication and language socialization, and enhancement of Australian research capacity in these fields. This should lead to significant practical benefits, improving Australia's ability to adapt to cultural diversity and to counteract its disadvantages in schools and everyday life.Read moreRead less
Children's language learning and the development of intersubjectivity. How do children learn languages? How do they learn to understand the intentions and perspectives of others, and coordinate their own with them? Based on research in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, this project will answer these questions, showing how the two processes are related to each other by studying them in a cross-cultural way.
Western Desert speech styles and verbal arts. Verbal arts are central to social interaction. In the Western Desert Ngaanyatjarra and Ngaatjatjarra people use special speech styles to mark particular occasions and life transitions. Led by Ngaatjatjarra linguist, researcher and educator Elizabeth Marrkilyi Ellis, the research team aims to build on a corpus of these endangered oral traditions. Following in-depth linguistics analysis the project aims to implement strategies to revitalise these endan ....Western Desert speech styles and verbal arts. Verbal arts are central to social interaction. In the Western Desert Ngaanyatjarra and Ngaatjatjarra people use special speech styles to mark particular occasions and life transitions. Led by Ngaatjatjarra linguist, researcher and educator Elizabeth Marrkilyi Ellis, the research team aims to build on a corpus of these endangered oral traditions. Following in-depth linguistics analysis the project aims to implement strategies to revitalise these endangered styles through dynamic contemporary applications thus reintegrating them into the language socialisation framework of youth. The project aims to assist Aboriginal people to safeguard their heritage and contribute to a wider public appreciation of Aboriginal languages and cultures.Read moreRead less
The Semantics of Canonical Parallelism: Oral composition among Rotinese poets, eastern Indonesia. The pairing of words, known in linguistics as parallelism, is a critical feature of the oral traditions of the world. This strict use of couplets for oral compositions is a characteristic of the vibrant traditions of verbal communication on all the islands of eastern Indonesia. This project focuses on the oral traditions of the island of Roti, Australia's closest Indonesian neighbour. Using new anal ....The Semantics of Canonical Parallelism: Oral composition among Rotinese poets, eastern Indonesia. The pairing of words, known in linguistics as parallelism, is a critical feature of the oral traditions of the world. This strict use of couplets for oral compositions is a characteristic of the vibrant traditions of verbal communication on all the islands of eastern Indonesia. This project focuses on the oral traditions of the island of Roti, Australia's closest Indonesian neighbour. Using new analytic techniques applied to an extensive recorded corpus, it seeks to identify underlying mechanisms of verbal composition that may be applied comparatively to other oral traditions throughout the world, thus locating Australia at the forefront of the international study of oral traditions.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE120100720
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$375,000.00
Summary
Connecting, communicating and learning through new media: Indigenous youth and digital futures in remote Australia. This project examines the sociocultural and linguistic implications of digital technologies in remote Indigenous Australia. It will provide new perspectives to support policy development for youth engagement in the digital economy, as well as cultural and educational insights that will provide an important theoretical contribution to international youth media research.
Waves of words: mapping and modeling Australia’s Pacific ties. This project aims to determine the extent and nature of ancient contact relationships between first peoples of Australia and the Pacific by exploring linguistic interactions. The project will use complementary sets of methods and expects to discover what kinds of social configurations underlie different linguistic outcomes in language contact situations. This will improve our understanding of the relationship between language change ....Waves of words: mapping and modeling Australia’s Pacific ties. This project aims to determine the extent and nature of ancient contact relationships between first peoples of Australia and the Pacific by exploring linguistic interactions. The project will use complementary sets of methods and expects to discover what kinds of social configurations underlie different linguistic outcomes in language contact situations. This will improve our understanding of the relationship between language change and socio-cultural change, which will have significant impact on linguistic and anthropological theory.Read moreRead less
Placenames and Personal Names in Yolngu Society and Country Through Time. The Yolngu peoples’ land and sea Country in north-east Arnhem Land is densely named, as a consequence of the actions of ancestral beings who gave shape to Country and to Yolngu society in place. Placenames are sung in ceremony, and passed down through the generations as personal names. This project aims to document the placenames of two Yolngu regions and explore what they tell us about Yolngu society as a system that has ....Placenames and Personal Names in Yolngu Society and Country Through Time. The Yolngu peoples’ land and sea Country in north-east Arnhem Land is densely named, as a consequence of the actions of ancestral beings who gave shape to Country and to Yolngu society in place. Placenames are sung in ceremony, and passed down through the generations as personal names. This project aims to document the placenames of two Yolngu regions and explore what they tell us about Yolngu society as a system that has been in place for thousands of years. In consultation with Yolngu, it aims to create an interactive map and database archive to which Yolngu historians can add in the future, providing significant benefits for a community for who consider these names to be central to their identity and wellbeing – past, present and future.Read moreRead less
Skin and kin in Aboriginal Australia: linguistic and historical perspectives on the dynamics of social categories. Indigenous Australians have unique ways of talking about social relations, linking them over wide regions as family. This project will trace the history of these terminologies and the evolution of these relations. The results will reveal the dynamics of Indigenous societies and resolve long-standing questions about human society generally.
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. Language is central to human existence and to the flow of information. The Centre will address the most critical questions about language: How do languages evolve? How different can languages be? How do our brains acquire and process them? How can technologies deal with the complexity and enormous variability of language in its central role in human information processing? What can Australia do to increase its linguistic abilities at a time ....ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. Language is central to human existence and to the flow of information. The Centre will address the most critical questions about language: How do languages evolve? How different can languages be? How do our brains acquire and process them? How can technologies deal with the complexity and enormous variability of language in its central role in human information processing? What can Australia do to increase its linguistic abilities at a time of increasingly multilingual demands in trade and information? The Centre will also secure language heritage, develop new language technologies, connect policy with indigenous and migrant communities, and build strategies to help 1st and 2nd language learning and those isolated by language difficulties.Read moreRead less