Announcement Linguistics in the Pub Tuesday June 14th

[Ruth Singer]

Announcement

Linguistics in the Pub (LIP) June 2011
Organised by RNLD http://www.rnld.org

Topic: Ethnobiology in Language Documentation
Discussion led by Gwen Hyslop, Research Centre for Linguistic
Typology, La Trobe University

Ethnobiology, as a discipline, is generally concerned with the set of
relationships that a given society has with its plants and animals. As
speakers of endangered languages lose their traditional connections
with their surroundings, we also very quickly lose the ethnobotanical
knowledge that was represented in that language. As linguists engaged
in language documentation, often with communities who have vastly
different ethnobiological knowledge and practices than we have, we are
in a unique position to document ethnobiology as part of language
documentation. The question, though, is how we can do this as
linguists?

Background readings
Berlin, Brent. 1992. Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of
Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional
Societies.Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bright, Jane, and William Bright.  1965.  Semantic structures in
Northwestern California and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. American
Anthropologist 67:249-58.  (Special issue:  E.A. Hammel, ed., Formal
Semantic Analysis).

Brown, C. H. 1984.  Language and Living Things:  Uniformities in Folk
Classification and Naming.

Hunn, Eugene, and David French.  1984.  Alternative to taxonomic
hierarchy:  the Sahaptin case. Journal of Ethnobiology4:73-92.  Also
in Case Studies in Ethnobotany, Paul E. Minnis (ed.), pp. 118-139.

Rea, Amadeo M. 1998.  Folk Mammology of the Northern Pimans.
University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Si, Aung. 2011. Biology in Language Documentation. The Australia
National University, ms.

Turner, Nancy. 2000.  General Plant Categories in Thompson
(Nlaka'pamux) and Lillooet (Stl'atrimx), Two Interior Salish Languages
of British Columbia.  In Case Studies in Ethnobotany, Paul E. Minnis
(ed.), pp. 88-115.

Selected readings will be made available through the Events page of
the RNLD website

Date:      Tuesday 14th June
Time:      7:00 pm
Venue:    Upstairs room, Prince Alfred Hotel,
191 Grattan St, Carlton
(corner of Bouverie St)
ph ‪(03) 9347-3033‬

Food and drinks available at the venue.

Contact  Ruth Singer if you have any questions rsinger at unimelb.edu.au

-- 
Ruth Singer
ARC Research Fellow
Linguistics Program
School of Languages and Linguistics
Faculty of Arts
University of Melbourne 3010
http://www.linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/about/staff/profiles/singer/