Time: 10am AEDT
Date: Wednesday, 8 November 2023
Speaker: Kira Davey
Venue: Seminar Room G, HC Coombs Building & Online via Zoom
Passcode: 773528
Linguistic settings characterised by intense, prolonged contact between minority languages are historically understudied and becoming rarer in the world today due to ongoing effects of colonisation and globalisation.
Consequently, our understanding of how people organize themselves socially and linguistically in these settings is limited. In areas of Papua New Guinea, people still have high levels of multilingualism in multiple local languages of which there are a small number of speakers. This type of linguistic environment is termed ‘small-scale multilingualism’ when the languages are relatively equal in hierarchy and neither is considered prestige (Lüpke 2016).
One such setting is that of north-east Madang province, where archaeological evidence suggests that Bel (Oceanic, Austronesian) and Madang (Trans-New-Guinea, Papuan) languages may have been in contact for 550-650 years (Gaffney et al., 2018). Due to this prolonged contact and speakers’ multilingualism, western Bel languages underwent a series of major structural changes modelled on neighbouring Papuan languages, resulting in the acquisition of clause chains (Ross, 2008; Barth & Ross, In Press).
Kira's thesis will focus on variation in clause chain use in two of these languages: Yoidik (Madang) and Matukar Panau (Bel). She will use a mixed-methods approach, adopting both qualitative and quantitative techniques to compare and systematically analyse the effect of language repertoire, other social variables and linguistic variables on clause chain use in the two languages. There are few empirical studies of language variation in multilingual settings and even less in those where multilingualism is non-hierarchical.
This research stands to address this gap whilst also contributing to the growing literature on clause chaining and providing the first grammar sketch of the Yoidik language.
References
Barth, D. & Ross, M. (In Press). Clause chaining in Matukar Panau (Oceanic). In H. Sarvasy & A. Aikhenvald (Eds.), Clause chaining in the languages of the world. Oxford University Press.
Gaffney, D., Summerhayes, G. R., Mennis, M., Beni, T., Cook, A., Field, J., Jacobsen, G., Allen, F., Buckley, H. & Mandui, H. (2018). ‘Archaeological investigations into the origins of Bel Trading Groups around the Madang Coast, Northeast New Guinea’, The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 13(4): 501-530.
https://doi.org/10.1080/15564894.2017.1315349
Lüpke, F. (2016). Uncovering Small-Scale Multilingualism. Critical Multilingualism Studies, 4(2), pp. 35-74.
Ross, M. (2008). A history of metatypy in the Bel languages. Journal of Language Contact: Thema, 2, 149–164.
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