News

10 Feburary 2020

The university year is almost about to start... It's been quite the summer in Canberra, with bushfires, thick smoke haze, and a torrential hailstorm!

In semester one, 2020, I am coordinating and co-teaching ANU's foundational linguistics subject, Introduction to the Study of Language. Introductory linguistics subjects often deal only very cursorily with signed language. In our course, lecture 2 of 24 is dedicated entirely to signed languages, and I will be weaving information about signed languages as we tour up through all of the linguistic levels.

In other news, Alan Rumsey and I have a chapter in Adam Kendon's book, "Sign Language in Papua New Guinea", which has just been published by Benjamins! The book is a reissue of Adam's series on signing in Enga province, Papua New Guinea, originally published in 1980 in Semiotica. You can get a sneak peek via Google Books here.

4 December 2019

I'm delighted to have been awarded an ANU University Medal, for "exceptional academic excellence". I'm very proud that for both of my degrees, I've been awarded the respective university medals! Not bad for a single mum, if I do say so myself.

I'm currently in my home town of Melbourne, attending the annual summer school of the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. Over the last two days, I've been able to join the pantheon of Australian and other sign linguists instructed by Trevor Johnston (Adam Schembri, Gabrielle Hodge, Lindsay Ferrara, Lori Whynot, Lou de Beuzeville...) - although my fantastic experience of TJ was unfortunately two days, rather than three+ years! I'm refreshed and inspired by Trevor's approach to sign linguistics and language more generally. I'm looking forward to bringing this to bear on work I am doing with Danielle Barth and Gabrielle Hodge, comparing ways of making meaning by Auslan signers and Matukar Panau speakers (an Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea).

In other news, two of my papers are undergoing a second round of revisions. In the first, I look at two ways people communicate in sign in Port Moresby, namely SIGN LANGUAGE and CULTURE. In the paper, I draw on emic perspectives, differences in acquisition pathways and circumstances of use of the two ways, and differences in lexicon. In the second, Alan Rumsey, Francesca Merlan and I look at the acquisition of clause chaining in the Papuan language, Ku Waru, and see how it lends support to Diessel's (2004) notion that children learn constructions first and later create novel forms based on these lexically specified frames.

12 October 2019

Hello from Heathrow! I have spent a rich and rewarding month in Europe, visiting the Sign Language Linguistics group at Radboud University, and DCAL, University College London, as well as attending the 13th Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research conference in Hamburg. Some highlights:

  • Meeting feisty fellow fieldworkers Rehana Omardeen, Hannah Lutzenberger and Kristian Ali, who are doing fantastic, fascinating work with communities using Providence Island SL, Kata Kolok, and Bay Islands SL - an emerging tactile SL in the Caribbean
  • Embracing Dutch bike culture and pedalling all over Nijmegen
  • Tory Sampson's fantastic, award-winning presentation on the copular cycle in ASL at TISLR13 - check it out here!
  • My first experience using international sign, and pestering everybody with my questions about what they think it is (once an ethnographer...)
  • Getting fantastic feedback from audiences at Radboud and DCAL on my initial explorations into verb 'agreement' (or indication... or directionality...!) in the sign language used at Kailge, Western Highlands
  • Seeing the world's only soft-tissue dodo specimen at the Oxford Natural History Museum!
Presenting one of my three posters at TISLR13 (see site home page for links). Photo by Kristian Ali.

20 September 2019

Two good pieces of news! My abstract for a paper at the Australian Linguistic Society annual conference has been accepted. It's titled "A novel comparative method for young sign languages: Base comparison". You can download the abstract here: 10.6084/m9.figshare.9883385.

Alan Rumsey, Francesca Merlan and my paper on the acquisition of clause chaining in Ku Waru has been accepted to Frontiers in Communication, pending revisions. We will be working on these over the next month.

4 September 2019

I'm in the final stages of writing a paper arising from my presentation at UCLAN in July 2019, which incorporates a sociodemographic sketch of the Port Moresby deaf community, and exploration of bilingual practices.

Professor Alan Rumsey and I are writing a paper which presents my thesis findings in relation to the 'missing links' in the extant sociodemographic typology of sign languages, and new explanatory concepts to enrich the field, including nucleated network sign languages, sign networks, and the regional sign network.

I am preparing talks on verb 'agreement' in sign language used in the Papua New Guinea Highlands, which will be presented at a Sign Pop-Up at Radboud University on 20 September 2019, and at the Deafness, Cognition and Language research centre at University College London on 7 October 2019.

I am preparing three posters for presentation at the 13th meeting of TISLR at the University of Hamburg, 26-28 September 2019.