Monash Linguistics Seminar Semester 2/2009
Tuesdays, 11.00am-1.00pm
Followed by lunch & coffee in the Staff Club (you can also bring your own food to the club).
All welcome!
Please note that the seminars are held at three different locations throughout the semester, so please check the campus map.
Information on previous seminars can be found here.
21st July
Seino van Breugel
RCLT, La Trobe University
Attributive clauses in Atong
Room: W220, Menzies Building
(abstract)
11t August
David Lasagabaster
University of the Basque Country (Spain)
Language competence, use and attitudes in Spanish bilingual contexts
Room: W220, Menzies Building
(abstract)
25th August
Finex Ndhlovu
Victoria University and Monash University
Politics of Language in Postcolonial Africa Revisited:
The Agency of Minorities to Hegemonic Language Impositions
Room: KG23 (Krongold Building next to Education (Bld 6))
(abstract)
15th September
Birgit Hellwig
Erfurth University
Semantics in language contact: Lexical aspect on the Jos Plateau (Nigeria)
Room: KG23 (Krongold Building next to Education (Bld 6))
(abstract)
29th September - CANCELLED
Peter Gerrand
Monash University
The challenge for minority languages in an Internet dominated by English
Room: W220, Menzies Building
(abstract)
20th October
Michel C Ewing
The University of Melbourne
Unattached phrases in conversational Indonesian
Room: W220, Menzies Building
(abstract)
Abstracts
Seino van Breugel
RCLT, La Trobe University
Attributive clauses in Atong
Analysing noun-modifying clauses in Atong, a Tibeto-Burman language of Northeast India, I found that the general typological and Tibeto-Burman literature did not provide me with an adequate framework to explain the phenomena that I found in the language. The term “relative clause”, normally used for a clause that modifies a noun, stirs up a whole series of expectations in the linguistic audience. This term is tied up with notions like “extraction”, “common argument”, “relative pronoun”, “gapping”, “syntactic restrictions”, “accessibility hierarchy”, “internal vs. external head” etc. To avoid resuscitating such expectations, I termed noun modifying clauses in Atong “attributive clauses”. In my presentation I will focus on the pervasive notions of “common argument” and “gap”. Attributive clauses in Atong do not contain a common argument or a gap. I will argue that the term “common argument” is misleading, and that it is a fallacy to say that a noun modified by a clause functions on its own as clausal constituent in a matrix clause. Building forth on work by Matsumoto and Comrie, I will argue that there is no need to posit a gap within the noun-modifying clause, as there are no syntactic constraints that forces such an interpretation of the data.
David Lasagabaster
University of the Basque Country (Spain)
Language competence, use and attitudes in Spanish bilingual contexts
Although the presence of more than two languages in the curriculum is an expanding phenomenon in Europe, the number of research studies tackling the analysis of multilingual school contexts is still scant. This presentation is aimed to examine language competence, use and attitudes in different Spanish bilingual contexts where the presence of three languages in the curriculum from a very early age has become the norm.
In Spain the 1978 Constitution states that Spanish is the only official language. However, it also establishes that other languages can also be official in their respective territories if this possibility is provided for in their statute of autonomy. As a result, the statutes of six Communities (Catalonia, the Valencian Community, the Balearic islands, Galicia, the Basque Country and Navarre) proclaim the existence of a language of their own which, together with Spanish, is the official language in their territory.
In this paper the bilingual communities with the largest populations (Catalonia, the Valencian Community, Galicia and the Basque Country) will be considered. First of all, each particular sociolinguistic context and educational system will be briefly described. Secondly, language competence, use and attitudes towards the minority, the majority and the foreign language will be examined. The participants were 938 university students whose degrees were geared towards teaching and who completed an essentially identical questionnaire. Those who are going to become teachers in the short run were chosen in the belief that their influence on future generations’ language beliefs is beyond any doubt. Finally, a comparison and discussion of the results will be completed.
The data showed that competence and attitudes towards the minority language amongst Spanish pre-service teachers are better than ever before, whereas the picture regarding the command of foreign languages happened to be much dimmer. Thus, the European Union’s objective of multilingualism for all still seems to have a long way to go.
Finex Ndhlovu
Victoria University and Monash University
Politics of Language in Postcolonial Africa Revisited:
The Agency of Minorities to Hegemonic Language Impositions
This paper returns to the knotty question of minority language maintenance in the face of impositions of standardized hegemonic national language(s) in post-colonial Africa. Drawing on postcolonial resistance theories, empirical data on the language ecology of Zimbabwe as well as case studies from other multilingual African contexts, the paper is a rethink of the agency of minority ethnolinguistic groups to the declining use of languages other than officially recognized standard languages. The paper confronts an issue that has so far not been addressed directly by research scholarship on African sociolinguistics – the question on the role of minority ethnolinguistic groups in the marginalization of their own languages. The premise is that the imposition of hegemonic languages is not always achieved without any form of resistance and/or consent from speakers of dominated languages. The paper argues that in spite of the existence of official language policies, there is still room for “unplanned” language planning activities to be used as a platform for resisting hegemonic language ideologies. By way of conclusion, it is noted that linguistically, all national boundaries are porous and for minorities to imagine themselves and their resistance strategies in national terms is tantamount to playing into the hands of the same hegemonic forces they are trying to undermine.
Birgit Hellwig
Erfurth University
Semantics in language contact: Lexical aspect on the Jos Plateau (Nigeria)
The Jos Plateau is a mountainous area in Central Nigeria that is "noted for its linguistic diversity" (Greenberg 1956: 115). Several dozen languages from two non-related language families (Chadic branch of Afroasiatic and Benue-Congo branch of Niger-Kordofanian) are spoken by small speech communities throughout this region. Given their distinct genetic origins, early researchers were puzzled to find considerable similarities across these languages. Today, it is accepted that the Jos Plateau constitutes a "sprachbund" or linguistic area whose languages share more similarities with each other than with genetically related languages spoken outside of this area. The research to date has focused on shared lexical items and grammatical structures. This talk investigates yet another linguistic resource - lexical semantics - and explores how lexical aspect categories have diffused within this sprachbund.
Peter Gerrand
Monash University
The challenge for minority languages in an Internet dominated by English
The concept of a 'minority language' is explored, first globally and then in the context of European charters and legislation, and UNESCO projects. An overview is given of the highly competitive global initiatives taken since the 1880s, starting with the Alliance Française, to promote the prestige of the major European languages; since WW2 the major impetus has been to counter the dominance of English. The position of regional languages without official status at the sovereign state level is of course much more vulnerable, even where they are truly global languages thanks to sustained emigration.
The impact of the progressive modern Spanish Constitution (1978) in supporting regional languages is highlighted, as background to the extraordinary initiatives taken by the Basque, Catalan and Galician regional governments in promoting their 'own languages' via the Internet. The Catalan initiatives in particular have been a stimulus and model for Welsh, Scots and Bretons, amongst other regional language nationalists The challenges for all minority language users in using the Internet are discussed, together with various initiatives taken to overcome these barriers.
Michael C Ewing
The University of Melbourne
Unattached phrases in conversational Indonesian
In conversational Indonesian, elements that regularly function as predicating material in non-verbal clauses – noun phrases, prepositional phrases, adverbials and so forth – also often occur as unattached elements. A straight forward example is given in (1).
(1) T: Hari apa datang kembali ke sini.
day what come return to here
‘What day will (you) come back here?’
W: Jum=at.
Friday
‘Friday’
The speaker’s intention is clear, yet it is not possible to determine any larger, clause-like structure that this (or any other) unattached element participates in. One might imagine that speaker W’s response is ‘reduced’ from a verbal clause like Saya datang kembali hari Jumat ‘I will come back on Friday’, mirroring T’s initial question. In this case, Jumat could be assigned the role of temporal adjunct. But equally likely is a scenario in which the speaker ‘reduced’ a non-verbal clause like Kembalinya hari Jumat ‘The(/my) return(ing) will be Friday’, in which case Jumat is a predicate. Gerundive constructions of this latter type are common in Indonesian conversation, especially in the context where an action has been previously mentioned in discourse. The only tenable position is to say that it is impossible to establish a grammatical structure that such an unattached element participates in – thus the term unattached. It is impossible to do so firstly because there will always be plausible competing structures that these phrases could be imagined to occur in – precisely because they belong to word classes that easily can, but prototypically do not, function as predicates. Secondly, speculation about fully specified clauses from which unattached elements derive yields indeterminate and unhelpful results, thus supporting the claim that these phrases do not participate in larger grammatical structures.
In this presentation I will examine the use of unattached elements (NPs, PPs and adverbials) in a corpus of informal conversational Indonesian. I will ask: How can we identify unattached elements in discourse and to what extent we can identify any syntactic role for such elements? What impact does the frequent use of unattached elements in conversation have on our understanding of ellipsis? What informational properties are associated with unattached elements? What interactional work is being done in conversation by unattached elements? Why do speakers choose to use ‘reduced’ constructions in discourse? Or – from the perspective of emergent grammar – do we take unattached forms to be unmarked and ask instead, why do people use more highly marked, less frequent, fully-elaborated constructions?