Linguistics
Head: Nick Evans
The Asia-Pacific is the most complex and varied linguistic landscape in the world. The Southwest Pacific contains around two thousand of the world's seven thousand languages; South, Southeast and East Asia another thousand. Each of these languages is the vehicles of a distinct and rich culture, forming the fine capillaries of communication across the region. Many are small and endangered, and in the coming decades the region is confronting an epochal narrowing of the human knowledge base through language loss. One of our unit's main goals is to promote the study of this linguistic diversity in its fullest sense, combining humanistic relevance with analytical rigour in fields like syntax, phonology, typology and semantics.
To this end, we are involved in documenting and describing the myriad languages of this vast region, drawing on fieldwork within the speech communities - and producing grammars, dictionaries and collections of recorded textual materials. These have relevance to many scientific questions - from what language can tell us about the human mind, to the full spectrum of design possibilities for mankind's most fundamental human creation, language, to the harnessing of language patterning to our understanding of deep human history. But they are equally important for small speech communities themselves, for establishing vernacular education or conserving the traditional ecological knowledge embedded in their languages. Our postgraduate training, at PhD and Master's levels, aims to produce descriptive linguists of the highest quality, equally able to carry out linguistic fieldwork and relate it to a broad range of theoretical issues. Good support for doctoral fieldwork is available. Minority languages currently or recently researched by staff, doctoral students and visitors cover sites ranging from Vanuatu, New Caledonia, PNG, Australia, Indonesia, Timor Leste, the Philippines, Taiwan, India and Japan.
Another type of challenge is posed by the study of the large national languages of the region, such as Japanese, Korean and Indonesian. The general theme of learning the lessons of linguistic difference continues here, sharpened by the analytic and historical depth of scholarship available. Research here focuses on topics like forensic voice comparison in Japanese, cross-linguistic pragmatics, the development of computational parsing systems for Indonesian, and the challenge of teaching these as second languages. We teach into all levels, including undergraduate courses in Japanese, Indonesian, Linguistics and Pacific Studies, Master's Courses in Linguistics and Applied Japanese Linguistics, as well as advanced doctoral training; much of this is in close cooperation with colleagues in the School of Language Studies, CASS. We also organise intensive training courses as appropriate, aimed at developing capacity in linguistic fieldwork and description in South and Southeast Asia and in Melanesia.
Members of the unit are active in the University's Centre for Research on Language Change. We co-host Paradisec, a distributed digital archive dedicated to sound and video recordings of languages and cultures of the Pacific. We also publish the monograph series Pacific Linguistics, which has produced over 600 publications on Pacific and Southeast Asian languages and linguistics.
