The language creators: Who does what when a new language emerges?
Lecture
2017 CoEDL Summer School Public Lecture We all know that languages change, and that new languages must come into being sometimes – but how? Why do some languages change a little and others change a lot? In this talk I will trace how a new Australian language, Light Warlpiri, emerged in the…
The Chronicle of the Morea(s): a chronicle of the Greek language
Seminar
Presented by Erma Vassiliou as part of the ANU Linguistics Seminar Series Please check back soon for further information.
Topics in Wiru grammar
Seminar
Presented as part of the ANU Linguistics Seminar SeriesWiru is a Papuan language spoken in the southern highlands of Papua New Guinea, and this seminar presents three typologically unusual features of its grammar. The research emerged out of a Field Methods class taught at ANU, and this is a…
Selection and drift in lexical regularisation: the problem with homonyms
Seminar
Presented as part of the ANU Linguistics Seminar SeriesTrue synonyms are very rare across the world's languages, but homonyms/homophones are ubiquitous. This represents a problem for recent evolutionary accounts of language change, which tend to assume most change is either neutral/drift-like or…
Language in Times of War and Conflict
Conference
Language in Times of War and Conflict An Interdisciplinary Symposium to be held at the Australian National University, Canberra 13-14 November 2017 This interdisciplinary symposium aims to bring together scholars and researchers working on diverse aspects of the topic of language in times of war…
Language shaming: enacting linguistic subordination
Seminar
Presented as part of the ANU Linguistics Seminar SeriesLinguistic discrimination is embedded in linguistic hierarchies where some ways of using language are seen as more or less valuable than other ways of using language. That means linguistic disadvantage is not random but experienced by those…
Sex and Gender in Russian and some other European languages
Seminar
Presented as part of the ANU Linguistics Seminar SeriesGender is a grammatical category in the Indo-European languages (and in some but by no means all other language families). One would assume that, in nouns designating animate beings, sex and gender should coincide, but that is far from being…