School of Languages and Cultures

Summer Research Program - 2021 Projects

AVAILABLE PROJECTS

  1. Developing and validating written and oral proficiency tests for second language Japanese
  2. Pragmatic understanding of the interaction between person reference and sentence endings in Korean
  3. Making First Nations eDictionaries
  4. Australian and Japanese Fantastic Arts
  1. Investigation into potential impact of communication style in the speakers’ first language on their second language communication
  2. From handwritten fieldnotes to the evolution of language: The verbs of Occitan (French)
  3. Translation project: Familiar postmemory in grandchildren’s letters to victims of the 1973-1990 civic-military dictatorship in Chile

6. From handwritten fieldnotes to the evolution of language: The verbs of Occitan (French)

Project duration:

6 weeks,10 January to 18 February 2022

30 hours per week

Description:

In collaboration with the French scientific body Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the British Academy, in this UQ linguistics project we will take handwritten phonetic transcriptions of verbal inflections in Occitan dialects and digitise them for use in computational research into language evolution.

Scholars will work closely with Assoc Prof Erich Round, and have the opportunity to meet international researchers from the CNRS and British Academy, who are part of a larger project using invaluable sources like this one to uncover the inner workings of language change.

Expected outcomes and deliverables:

Scholars will learn about modern research into how morphology evolves over time, and contribute to new discoveries by digitising one of the richest datasets available anywhere: unpublished, handwritten fieldnotes collected in south-western France during the mid 20th century for the Atlas Linguistique et ethnographique du Lanquedoc Occidental.

Scholars will be trained in reading and transliterating French dialectal phonetic script and gain firsthand experience in how traditional data sources are converted into modern, digital research datasets.

At the end of the project, scholars will have the opportunity to present a research report to their peers and to UQ linguistics researchers.

Suitable for: 

This project is open to applications from interested students who have completed LING1005. Familiarity with one or more Romance languages is desirable but not essential. The research will require and reward attention to detail.

Number of participants required: 2

Further information: 

Please contact Associate Professor Erich Round via email