Language and Culture in Northeast India and Beyond: In Honor of Robbins Burling

Mark W. Post, Stephen Morey and Scott DeLancey (eds.)
A-PL 023; open access, free to download as PDF
URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/38458

In the greater Northeast Indian region, one of the richest and most diverse ethnolinguistic areas in all of Asia, Robbins Burling stands out as a true scholarly pioneer. His extensive fieldwork-based research on Bodo-Garo languages, comparative-historical Tibeto-Burman linguistics, the ethnography of kinship systems, and language contact, has had a profound impact on the field of Northeast Indian ethnolinguistics and beyond, and has inspired generations of Indian and international scholars to follow his example. This volume of papers on the anthropology and linguistics of Northeast India and beyond is offered as a tribute to Robbins Burling on the occasion of his 90th birthday, his 60th year of scholarly productivity, and his umpteenth trip to Northeast India. languages.

New Advances in Formosan Linguistics

Elizabeth Zeitoun, Stacy F. Teng and Joy J. Wu (eds.)
A-PL 017 / SAL 003; open access, free to download as PDF

The volume is a festschrift in honour of Lillian M. Huang, a leading figure in Formosan linguistics. Contributions cover data from nearly all the extant Formosan languages, Atayal, Amis, Bunun, Kanakanavu, Kavalan, Rukai, Paiwan, Puyuma, Saaroa, Saisiyat, Seediq, Thao, Tsou, and Yami. Topics include new advances on the diachronic and synchronic phonology as well as the morpho-syntax of Formosan languages.

Language Documentation and Cultural Practices in the Austronesian World: Papers from 12-ICAL, Volume 4

I Wayan Arka, Ni Luh Nyoman Seri Malini, Ida Ayu Made Puspani (eds.)
A-PL 019 / SAL 005; open access, free to download as PDF

The issues discussed include language description,
vitality and endangerment, community partnerships in language revitalisation and dictionary making, language maintenance of transmigrants, documenting and archiving verbal arts, traditional music and songs, cultural aspects in translation and politeness.

North East Indian Linguistics 6

Gwendolyn Hyslop,Linda Konnerth, Stephen Morey, and Priyankoo Sarmah (eds.)
A-PL 014 / LPEHR 001; open access, free to download as PDF

The present collection of papers are
testament to the ongoing interest in North East India and continued success and growth in the community of North East Indian linguists. The papers for this volume were initially presented at the sixth and seventh meetings of the North East Indian Linguistics Society, held in Guwahati, India, in 2011 and 2012.

Argument realisations and related constructions in Austronesian languages: papers from 12-ICAL, Volume 2

I Wayan Arka and N. L. K. Mas Indrawati (eds.)
A-PL 013 / SAL 002; open access, free to download as PDF

This volume contains twenty-two papers describing and discussing the salient features of argument realisations in Austronesian languages as manifested in the nominal or verbal domain, or in both. The Austronesian languages featuring in this volume are typologically and geographically diverse, from those with rich morphology, as in Taiwan, to those that are highly isolating, as in Flores. The papers also reflect diversity in approaches and theoretical frameworks. This volume should be of interest to Austronesianists and typologists.

A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland

Amos B. Teo
A-PL 011 / SEAMLES 007; open access, free to download as PDF

This book offers a comprehensive description of the phonetic and phonological features of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland, North-east India. It represents the first in-depth investigation of the acoustic phonetics and phonology of tone in Sumi, and is one of the first extensive acoustic descriptions of a language of Nagaland. The book describes the segmental phonology, syllable structure and tone system of Sumi. It looks at the phonetic realisation of these tones and the effects of segmental perturbations on tone realisation. It also examines morphologically conditioned tone variation in Sumi. Finally, this book offers a cross-linguistic comparison of both the segmental phonology and tonal system of Sumi with that of other Tibeto-Burman languages of Nagaland..

Number and quantity in East Nusantara: papers from 12-ICAL, Volume 1

Marian Klamer and František Kratochvíl (eds.)
A-PL 012 / SAL 001; open access, free to download as PDF

This volume showcases the expression of number and quantity in a dozen minority languages spoken in Eastern Indonesia. While several papers offer a typological and comparative perspective, most contributions provide detailed descriptions of the numeral systems, universal quantifiers, classifiers, and the expression of nominal and verbal number in individual languages. Languages featuring in this volume include the Austronesian languages Sumbawa, Tolaki, Helong, Uab Meto, and Papuan Malay; the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages Abui, Bunaq, Kamang, Makalero, Sawila, and Western Pantar, and the West-Papuan language Tobelo.

A grammatical description of Kara-Lemakot

Matthew S. Dryer
A-PL 009 / SLIM 002;
open access, free to download as PDF

This is a grammatical description of the Lemakot dialect of Kara, an Oceanic language in the Lavongai-Nalik subgroup. It is spoken in the northwest part of New Ireland in Papua New Guinea, to the southeast of Tigak and to the northwest of Nalik. This description is based on the translation of the New Testament into Kara.
ISBN: 9781922185099 (ebook)

Variation in linguistic politeness in Vietnamese: A study of transnational context

Phuc Thien Le
A-PL 007 / SEAMLES 006; open access, free to download as PDF

This work is a revised PhD dissertation comparing politeness in Vietnamese spoken in Vietnam and Australia, hence the “transnational context”. The study uses naturalistic speech data recorded in everyday public contexts, including shops and markets, where the Vietnamese vernacular. The data corpus for each national context are more than 1000 turns at talk, and was transcribed and analysed in relation to four independent variables: national context, gender, role and generation.

Wa-Praok Vocabulary

H. L. Shorto
A-PL 006 / SEAMLES 005; open access, free to download as PDF

This is a facsimile edition of the Wa-Praok vocabulary prepared by late Prof. Harry Shorto from data he collected in Kengtung (Kyaingtong) in the east of Shan State (Burma) in 1957. The entries in this Riang-Lang are written in Shorto’s phonemic transcription, they are glossed in English, and are richly augmented with etymological commentary that includes citations from Shan, Burmese, many Austroasiatic languages, and Shorto’s (then) preliminary Proto-Mon-Khmer reconstruction. The present word list was found among boxes kept by his daughter Anna, which she kindly donated to the present series editor (Sidwell) for the purposes of publication and archiving. The images were created by scanning the original pages at 300 DPI in greyscale.
ISBN:  978192218505

Riang-Lang Vocabulary:  Compiled from the materials collected by G. H. Luce

H. L. Shorto
A-PL 005/ SEAMLES 004; open access, free to download as PDF

This is a facsimile edition of the Riang-Lang vocabulary prepared by late Prof. Harry Shorto in 1964, and which had until now only circulated privately as rather poor quality photocopies. Prof. Shorto complied the vocabulary in the context of preparing the first draft of his A Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary (posthumously published in 2006 by Pacific Linguistics), by compiling and analyzing data from the extensive notes of Gordon H. Luce (now archived in the manuscript collection of the Australian National Library). Luce’s notes were in turn based on his own field work in Burma and on the (now lost) substantial index card compilation of Prof. Otto Blagden, who preceded both Shorto and Luce at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African studies. The entries in this Riang-Lang are written in Shorto’s phonemic transcription, they are glossed in English, and are richly augmented with etymological commentary that includes citations from Shan, Burmese, many Austroasiatic languages, and Shorto’s preliminary Proto-Mon-Khmer reconstruction. The present word list was found among boxes kept by his daughter Anna, which she kindly donated to the present series editor (Sidwell) for the purposes of publication and archiving. The images were created by scanning the original pages at 300 DPI in greyscale.
ISBN:  9781922185044

Palaung Word List: Based on materials collected from Pan Shwe Kya, Namhsan, Sept-Oct, 1957

H. L. Shorto
A-PL 004/ SEAMLES 003; open access, free to download as PDF

This is a facsimile edition of the Palaung word list prepared by the late Prof. Harry Shorto in 1957 and not published in its entirety until now. Prof. Shorto spent time in Burma in the late 1950s, where it is well known that he compiled materials for his A Dictionary of Modern Spoken Mon (1962) and A Dictionary of the Mon Inscriptions (1971). At the time he also travelled within Burma and Thailand collecting data on various minority languages, especially Palaungic language of the Shan State. The present word list was found among boxes kept by his daughter Anna, which she kindly donated to the present series editor (Sidwell) for the purposes of publication and archiving. The entries in this word list are written in a phonemic transcription, they are glossed in English, and are richly augmented with etymological commentary that includes citations from Shan, Burmese and many Austroasiatic languages. The images were created by scanning the original pages at 300 DPI in greyscale.
ISBN: 9781922185037

Golden Palaung: A grammatical description

Pandora Mak
A-PL 003 / SEAMLES 002; open access, free to download as PDF

This is a grammar of Golden Palaung (Saam-Loong) according to data elicited, collected, and analyzed between July 2010 to May 2012. It is an Austroasiatic (Mon- Khmer) language spoken in the Namhsan area, Northern Shan State, Myanmar. The grammar is written primarily for the language community, using common terminology and local orthography as well as phonetic notation. It is supplemented with a lexicon of Golden Palaung occurring in the textual examples.

Prosody in Vietnamese: Intonational Form and Function of Short Utterances in Conversation

Kieu-Phuong Ha
A-PL 002 / SEAMLES 001; open access, free to download as PDF

This is the first book illustrating the use of intonation in Northern Vietnamese based on a hybrid approach combining Conversation Analysis and Laboratory Phonology. The results show that the role of intonation in (Northern) Vietnamese has been greatly underestimated in previous investigations. The interaction between intonation and lexical tone is analysed in the framework of autosegmental phonology. New evidence suggests that the melody at the edges of utterances in Northern Vietnamese can be analysed as a combination of the lexical tone of the final syllable and a boundary or intonational tone used to express communicative functions. The study also has implications for the analysis of intercultural communication.

Mali (Baining) dictionary
Mali-Baining Amēthamon Angētha Thēvaik

Tonya N. Stebbins
with the assistance of Julius Tayul

This is a dictionary of the Mali (Baining) language. It is presented in three parts. The first section, Mali–English, contains entries organised around Mali headwords. This section represents the Mali lexicon with English glosses and bilingual example sentences. Other information about particular word classes, for example the inflectional forms of verbs and the plural forms of nouns is also given here. (See the §3.1 on word class labels for further information on how each category is represented. This information is expanded in the Mali (Baining) grammar, also published by Pacific Linguistics.) Many Mali words have alternate forms depending on their phonetic context or grammatical value. The Mali-English section lists alternate forms in addition to the citation form where complete information is given.

The English–Mali section contains much of the same information about the language as the Mali–English section but it is organised in relation to English translations for Mali words. This section is designed to facilitate use by people who are not familiar with Mali. This version of the dictionary was compiled manually, rather than being generated mechanically, with the intention of maximising the likelihood that the reader will be able to find the best match for an English word. The thesaurus is organised into semantic groups — see the guide at the start of that section for details. The thesaurus only indicates the sense of a word that is relevant for each particular semantic category. The reader should consult the Mali-English section in order to ascertain other related senses and thus the broader semantic possibilities of each word.
ISBN: 9781922185006 (ebook)

New format and DVD

A New Course in Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin)
Dutton, Tom in collaboration with Dicks Thomas

Tok Pisin is one of the two major lingua franca of Papua New Guinea.  Throughout Papua New Guinea, speakers of Tok Pisin can now be encountered increasingly in areas which have otherwise been the exclusive realm of Hiri Motu, the other major lingua franca of the area.  The language has been gaining tremendously in importance and prestige during the last few years.  It always has been, and continues to be, the major means of intercommunication amongst Papuans and New Guineans who have no other language in common.  It has been used for a long time throughout Papua New Guinea for administrative purposes, but it's importance has been greatly enhanced through its becoming the language of discussion in the majority of local government councils and the Parliament.  It seems that Tok Pisin is heading towards becoming the unofficial national language of Papua New Guinea, a role which it is already fulfilling in some ways.
Tok Pisin is a pidgin language whose vocabulary is derived from, but by no means identical with, English to the extent of 70-80 percent, with 15-20 percent based on indigenous languages, but mainly Tolai of northern New Britain, and five per cent on other languages, predominantly German.  Its structure is in many ways un-English and is patterned on that of the Austronesian languages of the South-Western Pacific.  Book and audio DVD are a set.

Bislama: An introduction to the national language of Vanuatu (Darrell Tryon) is also available on audio DVD and a new format of the book is forthcoming.

A grammar of Wangkajunga:  A language of the Great Sandy Desert of North Western Australia
Barbara Jones
636

This book is a description of an Australian language from the Great Sandy Desert of north Western Australia.  It is a description of a language that has a detailed case system, complex cross-referencing by bound pronouns and a word order that is determined by pragmatics rather than syntax.  The description benefits from the lively natural language examples used by the principal language consultant.
By comparisons with other languages of the Western Desert the study highlights some of the features that group the northern Western Desert languages and distinguish them from those in the south.  It also draws some comparisons with the northern neighbours of the Western Desert belonging to the Marrngu and Ngumpin groups.

Dupaningan Agta: grammar, vocabularly and texts
Laura Robinson
635

Dupaningan Agta is an Austronesian language spoken in northeastern Luzon, Philippines by approximately 1400 semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers belonging to the Negrito ethnic minority.  The language is endangered, as it is beginning to lose child speakers.  Dupaningan is spoken in some thirty-five scattered communities, both along the Pacific coast (Philippine Sea) and inland, on both sides of the Sierra Madre mountain range.
This work is an overview of the basic grammar of Dupaningan Agta.  The author has tried to write it in such a way that it is accessible to any trained linguist, whether versed in Philippine languages or not.  Chapter 1 outlines the language situation.  Chapter 2 examines the phonology of the language, both historical and synchronic.  It outlines the most salient phonological changes from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian and shows the reflexes in modern Dupaningan.  This chapter also includes a detailed phonological analysis, which begins by discussing the phonemes of the language, then addresses various phonological rules.  Chapter 3 treats the Dupaningan noun phrase, discussing case markers, nominalization, pronouns, and adjectives.  Chapter 4 is an overview of the verb phrase, and treats the topics of voice, aspect, and adverbs, including the enclitic adverbial particles.  Chapter 5 addresses other syntactic issues of the Dupaningan sentence, dealing with word order, existential constructions, question formation, and clause combining.  There are three appendices to the grammar: the first, Appendix A, is a short dictionary of Dupaningan vocabulary; the second, Appendix B, is a collection of selected texts in Dupaningan; and the third, Appendix C, is a list of the items of primary data upon which this work is based and which are archived at Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC).

Takuu grammar and dictionary
Includes CD
Richard Moyle
634

Takuu is a Polynesian outlier in Papua New Guinea whose community chose to ban Christian churches and missionaries in the 1960s, and which is arguably the last location where traditional Polynesian religion is still openly and extensively practised, as is the associated language.  The island’s smallness, remoteness and lack of exploitable natural wealth have distanced it from PNG’s national economy, and the indigenous language is used by virtually the entire population of around 500.  Lack of paid employment opportunities has resulted in the ongoing growth of a large expatriate population scattered throughout the country.  A sinking land mass, salination of the gardens and recent devastating tidal surges are combining to jeopardise the long-term viability of residence, and plans are underway to relocate the entire population to Bougainville Island.
This dictionary is the third in an ongoing series of monographs about Takuu, following a bilingual anthology of fables (Naa kkai Takuu, 2003) and a musical ethnography (Songs fro the Second Float, 2007).
Within the electronic version on the DVD bound into the book are several hundred photographs and video clips illustrating local flora and fauna, topography, material culture, and song and dance performances.

Middle Khmer
Philip N. Jenner, edited by Doug Cooper
633

The book A dictionary of Middle Khmer completes the trilogy of A dictionary of pre-Angkorian Khmer and A dictionary of Angkorian Khmer. It provides a complete dictionary of words from the Middle Khmer epigraphic corpus of roughly 60 texts, inscribed in the period CE 1433 – 1750.  All headwords (which include variant spellings) are given in romanised transliteration and IPA transcription.  Extensive etymological notes are provided, with references to modern Khmer and Thai appearing in both transcription and modern vernacular scripts.  Definitions are in general accompanied by complete references to the Middle Khmer texts, along with brief translated passages.

The Nyulnyul language of Dampier Land, Western Australia
Volume 1: Grammar
Volume 2: Texts, wordlists and appendices
William B. McGregor
632

This book provides a detailed description of Nyulnyul, a Nyulnyulan (non-Pama-Nyungan) language traditionally spoken in the vicinity of Beagle Bay, situated towards the northern end of the Dampier Land peninsula, Western Australia. The language is now to all intents and purposes extinct, and the description is based primarily on recordings made by the present author with the last full speaker of the language, Mary Carmel Charles, in the last two decades of the twentieth century. In addition, secondary data recorded by missionary linguists and other amateur linguists from the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century was employed to circumvent inadequacies in the modern corpus.
The description comprises two volumes. Volume 1 is a description of the grammar of Nyulnyul, covering in as much detail as possible the phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax of the language; an introductory chapter situates the language with respect to other Australian languages and its social and historical context. Throughout there is a focus on meaning, on how the grammatical resources of the language are deployed in making meaning.
Volume 2 presents auxiliary information, including a representative sample of texts (including myths, stories about the traditional way of life, and religious liturgy), wordlists (Nyulnyul-English and English-Nyulnyul), a list of bound morphemes, and an overview of previous research on the language.

A dictionary of Kalam with ethnographic notes
Andrew Pawley and Ralph Bulmer
with the assistance of John Kias, Simon Peter Gi and Ian Saem Majnep
630

The Kalam people live in the Bismarck and Schrader Ranges in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. They speak a language belonging to the Trans New Guinea family. This dictionary is one of the major products of a project of anthropological and linguistic research among the Kalam, begun in 1960 under the leadership of Ralph Bulmer, with collaboration between native speakers of Kalam, linguists, anthropologists and specialists in various biological disciplines.
The dictionary is designed to be an ethnographic record, a kind of encyclopaedia of those elements of Kalam culture and society that are codified in language. The central part, the Kalam to English dictionary, provides definitions for about 14,000 distinct lexical units, grouped under about 6000 headwords. Definitions are often supplemented by ethnographic notes. Entries aim to systematically describe Kalam semantic categories and relations, for example, Kalam taxonomies of animals and plants, and kinship and colour categories, which differ markedly from those of European languages. The English-Kalam finder list provides a multi-level index, designed to enable the reader to find relevant entries and groupings of entries in the Kalam–English part, where fuller information is provided.
Three major varieties of Kalam are represented. Two are sharply divergent regional dialects, known as Etp mnm and Ti mnm. The third is Kalam Pandanus language, which people use in the high mountain forest when harvesting mountain pandanus nuts and in certain other special contexts. A substantial grammar sketch is included.

Language Documentation and Conservation has recently published a review of this book, and the review can be accessed here: http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/handle/10125/4572/Lynch.pdf?sequence=5.
Also, a review appeared in the March 2013 (Vol.122) issue of The Journal of the Polynesian Society, pp.87-90.

Department of Linguistics
School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific
The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, AUSTRALIA

Last modified: August 27, 2015
Authorised by: The Managing Editor.
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