Posts

Australian newspapers react to chaos: Using corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse Australian media reporting on the January 6th capitol attack

Australian newspapers react to chaos: Using corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse Australian media reporting on the January 6th capitol attack By Raphael Lo Schiavo-Rega This article was originally published by the Sydney Corpus Lab. Like many people across the English-speaking world, the January 6th capitol...

First-Person Pronouns and Discursive Characterisation in Science Fiction Anime

First-Person Pronouns and Discursive Characterisation in Science Fiction Anime By Kelvin Lee This article contains a sample of findings from Kelvin Lee’s recently completed thesis, which is available at https://hdl.handle.net/2123/28687. Cover image: Posters of anime films and tv series (Photo by Dex Ezekiel on Unsplash)....

Nick Enfield on Flow Piracy and Percolation in a Hydropower Watershed

In the latest Sydney Centre for Language Research (SCLR) Seminar, Professor Nick Enfield presents on a recently completed ARC Discovery project studying the dynamics of language contact in the context of a hydropower megadam in the Nakai Nam Theun (NNT) valley of Laos. Nick Enfield…

Using genetic evolution to reconstruct language family trees

Using genetic evolution to reconstruct language family trees By Alice Dolin In 1859 Charles Darwin published his work On the Origin of Species, famously laying out his ideas on evolution and natural selection. Almost immediately afterwards, other scholars noticed that a similar process of evolution...

Norman Haire Fund for Sexology Studies recipient announced

Norman Haire Fund for Sexology Studies Georgia Carr, a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics, was awarded the Norman Haire Fund for Sexology Studies. Georgia’s PhD project seeks to understand how sex education is taught and, by extension, how it can achieve its goals...

Gender inclusive writing: debates and backlash in France

Gender inclusive writing: debates and backlash in France By Lindsey Stevenson In September of 2017 Hatier published the first ever textbook written entirely using gender inclusive language, reigniting a controversy which has been present in French society since the 1980s. While certain organisations, linguists and...

Investigating Tonoexodus in New Caledonia

Investigating Tonoexodus in New Caledonia By Samantha Soon For the past three years I have been working on a language called Kwényï, spoken in the South Pacific on the Isle of Pines of New Caledonia. I was drawn to study this language because it has been...

Prolonged Closed Contact between Putonghua And Dialects in China

Prolonged Closed Contact between Putonghua And Dialects in China By Luyao Yuan Changde(常德) City, where I was born and have lived for more than twenty years, is a small city in Hunan Province with a history of about 2,200 years, located in south-central China. The...

Charles Kemp on word meanings across languages support efficient communication

In the latest Sydney Centre for Language Research (SCLR) Seminar, Professor Charles Kemp explores why languages have the semantic categories that they do, and how language supports effective communication. Charles Kemp is a Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne….

The Journal of the University of Sydney Linguistics Society

The Journal of the University of Sydney Linguistics Society By Theodore Tsolakis, Oscar Xiao and Anna Zhou The Sydney University Linguistics Society (LingSoc) is a society consisting mostly of undergraduate students at the University of Sydney who study Linguistics or have an interest in it....

Myfany Turpin on insect larvae nomenclature in Kaytetye

In the latest Sydney Centre for Language Research (SCLR) Seminar, Associate Professor Myfany Turpin considers the lexicon of edible insect larvae, one of five food categories in Kaytetye, an Arandic language of central Australia. She draws on collaborative fieldwork with Kaytetye speakers on their lands,…

Catherine Travis on Ethnicity and social class in a modern metropolis

Hosted by the Sydney Centre for Language Research, Catherine Travis from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University presented a seminar on ‘Ethnicity and social class in a modern metropolis’ on 13 August 2021. Sydney is a highly multilingual…

Zahid Akter on a new verb construction in Pangkhua

Hosted by the Sydney Centre for Language Research, Zahid Akter from the University of Sydney presented a seminar on ‘A new future construction from the verb t̪i ‘say’ in Pangkhua’ on 30 July 2021. Pangkhua is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh….

Randy LaPolla on The Creation of Meaning

Hosted by the Sydney Centre for Language Research, Professor Randy LaPolla gave a presentation on ‘The Creation of Meaning’ on 21 May 2021. Professor LaPolla is Professor of Linguistics with an appointment in Chinese in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore….

Their relationship was so close he called him ‘father’: Why a kin term can cause a stir

Photo by csm2mk RTW from Flickr and licensed under Creative Commons. Their relationship was so close he called him ‘father’: Why a kin term can cause a stir By Novi Djenar If you’re an Indonesian president, and male, people ordinarily call you (ba)pak, a kin...

A conversation with Lila San Roque

Dr Lila San Roque from the University of Sydney speaks with Professor Nick Enfield, SCLR Director about her research into the language of the senses. Listen here:  

We the linguists: A view from northeast India

We the linguists: A view from northeast India By Yankee Modi The northeast of India is not widely known. Think about India. You probably think about a triangle shape, starting with the Himalayas in the north and pushing into the Indian Ocean in the south....

Mark Post on the languages of Northeastern India

Dr Mark Post is a Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. In this episode of the SCLR Podcast, he speaks with Professor Nick Enfield about his research and work with Greater Mainland South East Asian and Himalayan languages. Listen here:

Jacques Raubenheimer on Automated Language Processing for evaluating health risks

Is it possible to detect new trends in substance use from language on social media? How is language data used in medical science? Dr Jacques Raubenheimer is a Senior Research Fellow in the Discipline of Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health at the University of Sydney,…

Antonia Rubino on Italian language and identity in Sydney

Associate Professor Nina Rubino is part of the Department of Italian Studies at The University of Sydney, and a member of the Sydney Centre for Language Research. She speaks to Nick Enfield about the Italian language and identity in Sydney, discussing how language and identity…

Alexandra Grey on Linguistics and the Law

Dr Alexandra Grey is a Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Sydney Law School, and founded and runs the Interdisciplinary Law and Linguistic Researcher’s Network. She spoke with Professor Nick Enfield of the SCLR about the relationship between law and linguistics, discussing language choice in…

Nick Riemer on the History of Linguistics

Dr Nick Riemer is a senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of English at the University of Sydney. Dr Riemer spoke to Professor Nick Enfield, Director of the Sydney Centre for Language Research, about the nature and development of linguistics and…

Jaky Troy on the Sydney Language

Professor Jaky Troy is Director of Indigenous Research within the Office of Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research at the University of Sydney. Professor Troy spoke to Professor Nick Enfield, Director of the Sydney Centre for Language Research, about the background and implications of her book, ‘The Sydney…

Publication: Studies in the Anthropology of Language in mainland Southeast Asia

The Sydney Centre for Language Research is pleased to announce the publication of ‘Studies in the Anthropology of Language in mainland Southeast Asia’, edited by Nick Enfield, Charles Zuckerman, and Jack Sidnell. Here is a link to this open access publication: http://hdl.handle.net/10524/52466 This special issue…

FRIAS COFUND Fellowship Programme applications now open

The University of Freiburg, one of the strongest research universities in Germany and member of LERU (the League of European Research Universities), offers a fellowship programme, the Marie S. Curie “FRIAS COFUND Fellowship Programme (FCFP)”. About 25 incoming or reintegration fellows per year (juniors and…

ARC funding for literacy research

ARC funding for literacy research Associate Professor Joanne Arciuli from the University of Sydney and her team have been awarded an ARC Linkage Grant for their project, ‘Literacy Instruction for Children with Autism’, which aims to develop and evaluate new ways to support comprehensive literacy...

Himalayan indigenous languages on ABC Late Night Live

Himalayan indigenous languages Mark Post, a lecturer of linguistics at the University of Sydney and a specialist in Himalayan languages, recently appeared on ABC's Late Night Live to discuss the issues arising out of identifying and preserving the hundreds of languages spoken in the Himalayas....

Contact and Multilingualism: New Series at Language Science Press

  Contact and Multilingualism: New Series at Language Science Press Call for Manuscripts Proposals The Contact and Multilingualism (CAM) series aims at providing a high quality and open- access publishing platform for empirical and theoretical studies on multilingualism and language contact. Being an inherently interdisciplinary...

Foundation for Endangered Languages Grant Round 2019 now open

Foundation For Endangered Languages Grant Round 2019 Call for Proposals The Foundation for Endangered Languages annual grant round for projects that will support, enable or assist the use of one or more endangered languages is now open. Key dates: Deadline for submission: 31 December 2018...