Key Projects

Available student projects

ANU is accepting PhD applications.

I am interested in students looking to do corpus-based documentation or usage-based variation projects of corpus data, particularly for endangered languages, languages of the Pacific and Papua New Guinea, and Oceanic languages.

Contact me & look at:

http://chl.anu.edu.au/study/graduate-research

Current student projects

Chair:

"Language change and variation in a multilingual speech community: Clause chain use in Yoidik and Matukar Panau" - Kira Davey

"Language variation in a multilingual-multicultural space: The case of Assamese vowels" - Saurabh Kumar Nath

"Children’s acquisition of Ku Waru (a Trans-New Guinea language)" - Caroline Hendy

Associate Supervisor:

"Semantics of landscape terms in Chinese" - Emma Rao

"A Grammar of Mentawai" - Emma Keith

"A Grammar of Kodhi, An Austronesian Language of Sumba Island, eastern Indonesia" - Yustinus Ate

"A Grammar of Simalur" - Keira Mullan

"Developing and documenting a system for using the Luqa vernacular as its own grammatical metalanguage, and its use by Luqa speakers to study and analyze their own language in the Solomon Islands" - Alpheaus Zobule

Previous Student Projects

Chair:

"How do teachers of Indonesian choose what to teach? Computational tools to explore usage patterns" - Zara Maxwell-Smith

Associate Supervisor:

"Social variation in the English of Chinese-Australians" - Qiao Gan

"Computational methods in aid of transcription and linguistics analysis, using the Southern New Guinea language Nen as a case study" - Sahlia Muradoglu

"Variation in Raga - a quantitative and qualitative study of the language of North Pentecost, Vanuatu" - Marie-France Duhamel 

"Placing spatial language and cognition in context through an investigate of Bininj Kunwok navigation talk" - Claudia Cialone

Honours:

"Dative Alternation in Tok Pisin - a quantitative corpus study" - Anastasia Likouresis

"Directional Constructions in Matukar Panau - a quantitative corpus study" - Kira Davey

Computer Science Student Research Projects:

"Topic Modelling on Endangered Language" - Bing Bo

co-supervised with Dr Gabriela Ferraro

"Natural Language Processing for Small Languages" - Yufeng Fang

co-supervised with Qiongkai Xu & Dr Gabriela Ferraro

Media Coverage

Comments on Language Endagerment & Preservation in the Pacific on ABC Pacific beat in English and ABC Wantok in Tok Pisin

Comments on Enga language lessons on TikTok social media. ABC Pacific Beat radio and ABC news coverage

Endangered Languages Documentation Programme special highlight on Matukar Panau

Corpus Linguistics, Typology, Complex Predicates, Oceanic Languages, languages of Papua New Guinea, Cognitive Linguistics, Usage-based Linguistics, Language Variation, Language Contact, Pidgins and Creoles, Grammaticalization, Speech Styles, Statistical Modelling, Language as a Probabilistic System