Fwd: PhD candidate wanted for project Multilingual Conversation at Warruwi Community, northern Australia

[Ruth Singer]

*PhD candidate wanted **Multilingual Conversation at Warruwi Community,
northern Australia*



A PhD candidate is sought to study the multilingual use of Aboriginal
languages in conversational interaction in north-west Arnhem Land,
Australia. Warruwi is a highly multilingual community where Mawng,
Kunwinjku, Ndjebbana, English and varieties of Yolngu-matha are spoken on a
daily basis. It is common for adults to marry outside of their own language
group. Most adults actively control the languages of their parents, and
have varying degrees of competence in several other languages (perhaps
their grandparents’, spouses’ and peers’). Children typically acquire two
Indigenous languages in the home, adding English to the mix when they
commence school.



The aim of this project is to study how speakers use multiple languages
within informal conversation at Warruwi Community. This project will
document unprompted interactions in families in which spouses claim
affiliation to different languages. Of particular interest are families
with spouses affiliated to both western and eastern Arnhem Land languages.
The successful candidate will build a corpus of annotated face-to-face
conversations recorded on high-definition video. The study will use
analytic methods of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics.
The candidate will have considerable scope for their dissertation topic but
some possible research questions might include·      In what contexts do
speakers consistently use a single language in a single interaction and in
what contexts do they code-switch frequently?

Do children code-switch more frequently than adults?

To what extent do those who speak only Yolngu-matha varieties as their
first languages use north-west Arnhem land languages in conversation, and
vice versa?

Apart from the linguistic code, in what other ways do speakers design their
talk for benefit of their recipients?

In multilingual conversation, how does gaze, pointing, gesture,
conventionalized sign, object manipulation, etc. interact with the spoken
languages in the construction of interactional moves?

The candidate will be supervised by Dr Ruth Singer, Dr Joe Blythe and a
third supervisor attached to the University of Melbourne’s Research Unit
for Indigenous Languages. Ruth will be able to provide support in getting
started doing fieldwork at Warruwi Community and additional fieldwork funds
through her DECRA.


Contact Ruth Singer rsinger at unimelb.edu.au or Joe Blythe
joe.blythe at unimelb.edu.au for more information