PhD Top-up scholarship in Linguistics within cross-corpus DoBeS project on three-participant events

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Posted by Anna Margetts

The project Cross-linguistic patterns in the encoding of three-participant events will start in 2013 as a cross-corpus project of the Documentation of Endangered Languages Program (DoBeS) of the Volkswagen Foundation (http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/); chief investigator: Anna Margetts (Monash University), co-applicants: Nikolaus Himmelmann (University of Cologne) and Katharina Haude (CNRS, Paris).

Faculty/School: Faculty of Arts, School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics
Location: Clayton Campus, Melbourne
Scholarship tenure: 3 years full time, beginning in 2013
Scholarship value: $6,750 per annum (conditions apply)
Laptop & standard software up to a value of $1700
Closing Date: 31 October 2012

Project summary: The project investigates the linguistic encoding of events which involve three participants. It brings together three areas of study: the encoding of three-participant events, the typological parameter of basic valence orientation, and the field of text-based typology. (For more details see the project description further below).

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ELDP Grant Round 2013 – Call for applications

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The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) at SOAS offers one granting cycle for 2013. The grant round opens next Monday 15th October 2012 10am (BST) and closes on 15th January 2013, 5pm (GMT). The key objectives of the ELDP are: to support the documentation of as many endangered languages as possible to encourage fieldwork on … Read more

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Crowd-sourcing and Language documentation: September LIP

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Ruth Singer recaps some of the interesting points of the last week’s Linguistics in the Pub, an informal gathering of linguists and language activists that is held monthly in Melbourne The most recent LIP included a demonstration of the Ma! Iwaidja phrasebook and dictionary app developed by the Minjilang Endangered Languages Publication project (publishing as Iwaidja … Read more

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PARADISEC’s ‘Data Seal of Approval’

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As we approach our tenth year of operation, it is gratifying that PARADISEC has achieved this seal of approval (DSA), based on 16 criteria (listed below, and see how we meet these criteria here: https://assessment.datasealofapproval.org/assessment_75/seal/html/). We have been a five-star Open Language Archives Community repository for some time, which also means that we are one of the 1800 archives whose catalog and metadata conform to the Open Archives Initiative standards, but the DSA looks more broadly at the whole process of the repository, from accession of records, through their description and curation and to disaster management. This is important for our depositors to know as they can be sure that their research output is properly described and curated, and can be found using various search tools, including google, but more specifically the Australian National Data Service, OLAC and the WorldCat, and also the aggregated information served in the Virtual Language Observatory.

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Bursting through Dawes (2)

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Further to my last post, I’ve read on, and my disappointment has only deepened at the treatment of the Sydney Language in Ross Gibson’s 26 views of the starburst world.

Think about the notes you made when you were getting into learning an undocumented language … Imagine they get archived and in a century or two someone looks through them and tries to work out what was going on when you made the notes.  With only shreds of metadata and general knowledge of the historical period to go on, the future reader makes inferences from the content. Could a cluster of words in one of your vocabulary lists point to a hunch you were checking? Or a sequence of illustrative sentences could be the skeletal narrative of a memorable experience shared with your teachers.

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Signs of change?

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London is about to experience Olympic fever again with the Opening Ceremony of the Paralympic Games taking place tonight. Already disabled athletes have started appearing in the city and interacting with locals and other visitors. The Paralympics provide a great occasion to focus attention on the issues and difficulties faced by disabled people across the … Read more

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Bursting through Dawes

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‘Aspects of the Sydney Language are a perennial fascination’, as I observed in a 2008 post, and the best record we have of the language is in the two notebooks of Lt William Dawes. Dawes himself has become a fascination and a new book pursues him to imaginary lengths. I have so far only read … Read more

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New blog about endangered languages

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Readers may like to check out and subscribe to a new blog that went live today: EL Blog from the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS, University of London. This new blog: “will add to [ELAR’s] support of collaboration between collection depositors and users by providing an additional platform for sharing information and advice. EL … Read more

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Distinguishing language documentation and language description, revisited: LIP discussion

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The distinction between language documentation and language description: a LIP discussion, Ruth Singer recaps last night’s Linguistics in the Pub, a monthly informal gathering of linguists in Melbourne to discuss topical areas in our field.

Last Monday’s debate about the distinction between language documentation and language description inspired by a recent article on the topic by Nikolaus Himmelmann in Language documentation & Conservation:
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2012. Linguistic Data Types and the Interface between Language Documentation and Description. Language Documentation & Conservation 6. 187-207

The discussion was led by Rachel Nordlinger and Nick Thieberger from the University of Melbourne. Also commenting on the debate was Eva Schultze-Berndt, visiting Melbourne Uni from the University of Manchester, via Kununurra and Cairns.

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