Bardi baby talk

In previous trips I haven’t been able to get any information about Bardi baby talk, but this time the women were using more Bardi to toddlers. I haven’t recorded any of this, and for ‘official’ Bardi people felt that baby talk wasn’t to be encouraged, but they were happy to talk about it. Here are some features of the register:

• It’s faster and higher than regular speech (unsurprising)
• It has a lot more repetition (also unsurprising);
• there’s some r > l substitution (roowil > loowil ‘walk’);
• Preverbs can be used without their light verb, which is not true for the regular language;
• There are some lexical substitutions (e.g. nyamnyam for aarlimay ‘food’);
• The ergative case marker seems to be omitted quite a bit.

Bardi variable arguments

I got a nice example of variable argument structure on this most recent field trip. The root ‘fear’ is –jargi-, and it takes an ergative subject and an oblique object. Unless, that is, there’s an infinitival clause, in which case the verb is intransitive and there’s no agreement for an object, just the infinitival clause. Also interestingly, it seems like the arguments of the infinitival clause can’t be fronted. In this, it differs both from other infinitival clauses and from finite clauses. All very intriguing…

High School visit

I spent about 45 minutes or so at the High School this morning. I reckon it was one of the best 45 minutes I’ve spent here. The kids were great – I gave a bit of a talk about what linguists do (complete with powerpoint!), about what I was doing when I was working with their grannies and great-grannies, and they asked me some questions about uni and language work and things like that. I gave them pretty much the same talk about linguistics that I give first year uni students (I used Aboriginal English/Standard English examples instead of Spanish), and they were pretty enthusiastic about the whole thing and had lots of questions.  We also talked a bit about going to uni.

It was really useful to me to get to know them a little better, and I’m glad they’ve now got my contact details. The community is in good hands for the future with those kids! Thanks Richard for letting me take over your literacy class for a bit!

More on language resources

I had a very positive meeting with the One Arm Point Bardi teachers on Friday. Most of the teachers are language ‘remembers’ – that is, they are not comfortable in talking in full sentences in Bardi, but they all grew up hearing the language and they recognise a lot.*

As far as I know, One Arm Point has the longest-running language/culture program in Western Australia. It’s been going for more than 20 years now, which is a real testament to the strength of this community and their commitment to keeping culture strong. It’s really impressive. One Arm Point school is talking about itself as a ‘three language school’ now, which is also really good. The three languages are Aboriginal English, Standard Australian English, and Bardi.

We spent a few hours on Friday afternoon going through some things and talking about ways to get more Bardi into classrooms, and how I could help for the rest of my time here and when I’m back in the US. I also got some feedback on language materials.

• Google earth placenames: we thought of a bunch of class activities that the kids could do with this, such as:
  • Using the ‘find’ button to find the name of their favourite fishing place and showing the class where it is.
  • Describing how to get to a place using the Bardi place names (this is the way that Bardi speakers give directions too – they don’t tend to use ‘left’ and ‘right’ or ‘north’ and ‘south’)
• KirrKirr dictionary: this is shaping up to be a pretty important resource, I think, especially for the teachers. I’ve got it running at school now and will be adding sound clips and photos as I have time.
• However, a much bigger deal would be an English – Bardi dictionary, where the English side of the dictionary has all the information that the Bardi-English side currently has. I think I’ve blogged before about the SIL Toolbox model of dictionary authoring and how badly it serves heritage speakers (and Corris et al (2004) make this point well too). I’m about 10% of the way through converting the Bardi-English dictionary to an English-Bardi one, using TshwaneLex (more on that in a future post). Doing it has made me look much more closely at how texts have been translated and what the semantic scope of each Bardi word is, so it’s quite a good exercise. Who knows how it’ll get done when I don’t have a TV to sit in front of in the evenings though..
• Time-aligned texts. I showed the teachers a demo of a CuPED text and they thought it was really great, and useful for the older students. We’ve been proofing new (mostly short) texts in the breaks between grammar questions so there’s now a nice collection of time-aligned school texts about various topics.

 

*An aside: if someone can point me in the direction of good resources for helping such speakers, that would save me some time with google.

Corris, M., C. Manning, S. Poetsch & J. Simpson. How useful and usable are dictionaries for speakers of Australian Indigenous languages? In International Journal of Lexicography, Volume 17, Number 1, March 2004.

Week 2: and with three days to go

I’ve decided to prioritise syntax elicitation for the rest of my time here, with text proofing filling in the time for a bit of a break from other things. I did some intonation elicitation today, and it worked pretty well, apart from the wind noise and the birds in the background. I have ok contour data though.

Some interesting stuff has come up too. I have more examples of final ergatives than any other case or corpus. In Bardi, the ergative behaves like a Wackernagel clitic for placement, but it’s an affix. Until 2008, I didn’t have any examples at all of any other placement. In 2008 I got some where a pronoun or demonstrative optionally didn’t ‘make position’ for the marking. Now I have some really long NPs where the ergative is on the head.

I have some baby talk examples too, though that’s for a different post.

I got some other examples of NP structure that I didn’t know about from previous trips, especially involving questions about interpretation of modifiers. I also got a better sense of almiidan ambooriny ‘anyone’ – it’s just for any in the sense of ‘anybody can tell you where the school is’, not for interrogatives (“did anybody tell you that I was going to Broome”) or under negation (I don’t know if anybody saw it).

I think I’ve done all the stuff I really needed to check in writing the grammar (though of course there’s always new stuff that could be explored!)

The trouble now is with three days to go, there’s still an awful lot to do! What to prioritize? Story proofing? More grammar? Lexical exploration? Video and gesture data?

Nganyji and Ngaanyji

OK, this is a bit embarrassing. Especially after I’ve sent off the grammar manuscript, but better late than never and it can still be corrected.

I was talking to Jessie this afternoon about various things this afternoon and she happened to say Ngaanyjə liyan minman bayimngan maman jobgo drink, ‘do you want me to buy you a drink from the shop, using something that I would write in Bardi as ngaanyja [ŋaːɲɟə]. Now, the normal interrogative particle is nganyji, with a short vowel and final high vowel, so this was a bit puzzling. So I asked about it, saying nganyji like I’d seen in other examples, and got corrected.

Further digging reveals that there are actually two question particles, not one: ngaanyj(a) and nganyji. The second is a fairly regular interrogative, while the first is an ability marker. There’s a nice minimal pair:

• Nganyji minjalagal? ‘Did you see it?’
• Ngaanyjə minjalagal? ‘Can you see it?’ 

Furthermore, I know I have vacillated about the spelling of this word in the past (as to whether it has a long vowel or not), but it was really hard to tell because: a) there is lengthening under stress, and this particle is mostly initial; and b) there is fast speech shortening and final vowel dropping.

Language Resources Feedback

I’ve been getting some feedback from community people about language resources, so I thought I’d share some of the comments about resources that people particularly liked.

Top of the list is the google earth .kmz file of Bardi place names; I did the original field work, some of it was based on Gedda Aklif’s work, and Laura Kling did a lot of additional work in transferring information from the dictionary to the place information tags.

Next was the story tapes. I did some individual story recording tracks, but it seems that some people have quite enjoyed the original field tapes themselves as well. I got a comment that someone liked the way I had let the old people talk, and put down what was important to them, without interrupting and asking too many questions (this was not exactly by design, it was just because I didn’t know very much, and I was lucky to work with people who had thought a lot about their culture and were able to talk reflexively about it.

Third was the Laves materials. These have turned out to be quite important in Native Title.

The school materials have all gone missing, as has the tape catalogue and all the tapes I made for the school. Can’t say I’m too impressed with that; it’s lessened my desire to spend a few thousand dollars of grant money giving them a set of volume two and a few copies of the reference grammar, I must say.