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School of Culture History and Language · ANU College of Asia and the Pacific
This course will examine the so-called Papuan languages, which are the 800 or so languages of Melanesia and surrounding areas (from Timor to the Solomon Islands) which do not belong to the Austronesian family – and which are famed as coming from the most linguistically diverse region on earth. These 800 languages belong to perhaps 45 distinct language families and, in around 1% of the world's land area, exhibit a degree of genetic and typological diversity found for the whole of Eurasia. The course will serve both to initiate students into the descriptive and comparative typological study of the Papuan languages and to consolidate and advance their understanding of the principles of language analysis and linguistic theory based on the data from the Papuan languages. It will run along two tracks: (i) a language-specific track, where we will gain in-depth familiarity with one Papuan language (choice will vary from year to year), and (ii) a broad survey of the nature of Papuan languages and the special analytic challenges that they raise for all areas of linguistic science, from phonetics/phonology through morphosyntax and semantics to studies of multilingualism, typology and the mechanisms that create linguistic diversity.
Two data analysis problems (each 500 words equivalent and each worth 10%)
Learning outcomes 1, 3, 4
Analysis of a short text (1000 words equivalent)
Learning outcomes 1, 3, 4, 5
Essay (3000 words equivalent)
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
The total workload for the course is 130 hours including in-class time and independent study. Other Information The course will run during Autumn Session, over ten weeks contact, in two blocks: 9/3-2/4 and 4/5-12/6. In each week there will be four hours of meetings, organised into two two-hour blocks, each with a ten-minute break in the middle. Student presentations will take place during the fortnight 11-22 May.
Course materials will be available on Canvas. Preliminary Reading Evans, Nicholas. 2012. Even more diverse than we thought: the multiplicity of Trans-Fly languages. In Nicholas Evans & Marian Klamer (eds.) Melanesian Languages on the Edge of Asia: Challenges for the 21st Century. Language Documentation and Conservation Special Publication No. 5: 109-149. Palmer, Bill. 2018. Language families of the New Guinea area. In BIll Palmer (ed.) The Languages and Linguistics of New Guinea: A Comprehensive Guide. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Pp. 1-19.