Three pieces of good news

Logging onto abc.net.au/news this morning resulted in three good news stories from Indigenous Australia, I’m happy to say:

• A story on Kaurna traditional bark canoes.
• Nyangumarta people won their Native Title claim!
• Stan Grant senior was awarded an OA in the Queen’s Birthday honours for his work on Wiradjuri language revitalisation.

Good show.

Fieldwork and the movies (1): Indiana Jones

Back in February I was part of a panel at the Rice Linguistics Society meeting on linguistic theory and fieldwork and their relations. My talk was comparative in nature and focused on the contribution to the field of certain important figures; Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, and Gregory House. Over the next few weeks I will be serialising this talk and expanding it.

My point was that we can learn from comparing problem solving and theoretical approaches to shed light on how different people view theory and practice. Everyone who’s received a newsletter from LaTrobe’s Research Centre for Linguistic Typology has seen the quotation from Sherlock Holmes about how it is a capital mistake (Watson) to theorise beyond one’s facts. But there is more to Holmes’ view than this.

Today, though, I’ll start with a great figure in linguistic fieldwork (if not in linguistic theory): Indiana Jones. Indy knows a bunch of stuff, not just his field narrowly, but random other information that often comes in handy. We learn in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for example, that he picked up Quechua while being held for ransome. His problem-solving methods are highly focused and he is not detered by set-backs. However, it’s worth noting that his problem-solving strategies are only appropriate to a very narrow set of problems. How does Indy approach problems other than “getting the girl” and stopping the bad guys from getting the treasure first?

Indy’s theoretical orientation is not particularly nuanced, it must be admitted. His data are what they are; he never finds out that the object of his quest is something other than it appears, the bad guys are always bad (and so are half the good guys), and the girl is usually an irritatingly naive dipstick. Even more theoretically disturbing is the lack of uniformitarianism in the theoretical outlook; can’t solve the problem with the tools of this world? Never mind, there are always aliens.

Database of structures

There’s a new online database of structures being developed. This from the LinguistList:

Dear LinguistList Readers,

We are pleased to announce SSWL, an open-ended database of the syntactic
structures of the world’s languages:

http://sswl.railsplayground.net/

(alternatively, Google: sswl database)

Please feel free to go to the site and play around with it, doing searches
and browsing the languages and properties.

Ultimately, we hope to fill the database with thousands of grammatical
properties and thousands of languages all provided by members of the wider
linguistic community.

If you have any questions or comments, please send them to:
linguisticexplorer@gmail.com

Chris Collins
Department of Linguistics
NYU

I will have more to comment on this once I’ve played with it a bit more.

Inside Higher Ed

The LSA’s ethics statement is discussed in an article on Inside Higher Ed. Enjoy. And don’t forget to visit the blog.

Stats from database

I recently updated my Pama-Nyungan database to show some summary stats. Here are the subgroups with the most data points:

Warluwaric    8011
Thura-Yura    8107
Maric    8690
Marrngu    13038
Paman    13410
Ngumpin-Yapa    13943
Karnic    19972
Yolŋu    23923

So far, there are 3607 reconstructions. Yolŋu again leads, with 807, and Karnic is second. However, about 1/3 of the reconstructions haven’t yet been labelled with a subgroup so it’s hard to give meaningful figures yet.

Eventually, I will be able to give stats about innovation and retention among languages and subgroups, but that’s a long way off yet.

There are 190,000-odd language headwords in the database at present, but that’s about to go up substantially.

community heritage grants

The National Library of Australia’s Community Heritage Grants program is calling for new proposals. Information can be found here. Looks like it would be very appropriate for Indigenous language work.

Stress, tactus, ictus and polyrhythms

Mark at Language Log recently posted on metrics in music and I have a couple of points to add.

Renaissance composers frequently play around with syncopation and word stress for effect. Renaissance music wasn’t composed with bars and key signatures like more familiar classical music, but there is a tactus or beat. Going with the word stress against the tactus can create hemiola effects and highlight parts of the text. An equivalent clash in ictus and word stress is also used in classical hexameters. Virgil is very fond of this in the more alarming battle narratives.

Some composers get the word stress wrong. I see it most commonly in modern composers trying to set Latin texts but Handel is also famous for this; Mark mentioned and he shall reign where the words line up, but in the setting of And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, of is stressed (except in most modern editions where the underlay is altered so glory gets two prominent beats). Handel also gives prominence to For in for unto us a child is born and other conjunctions that would usually go on an upbeat.

One of the features of Bardi ilma song style is stress shift, but it doesn’t occur in all verses. I don’t know how common it is in other Australian song styles.