Dr Brett Baker
Senior Lecturer, School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences
Qualifications
BA (Hons), PhD (Sydney)
Contact
| Email: | brett.baker@une.edu.au |
| Room: | E11 111 |
| Phone: | 02 6773 3220 (or +61 2 6773 3220 overseas) |
| Homepage: | http://www-personal.une.edu.au/~bbaker2/ |
Since February 2002 I've been teaching in the Linguistics discipline in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, University of New England. Units I have taught: LING100/101/102/450 (introductory first year units), LING306 and LING464 First language acquisition, LING307 Second language acquisition, LING313 Language description, LING330 Language in multilingual societies, LING360 Generative Syntax.
In 1999 I completed my PhD entitled Word Structure in Ngalakgan, at the Dept of Linguistics, University of Sydney. The thesis is a study of morphology, phonology, and prosody in Ngalakgan, and the interactions between the three of these. Ngalakgan is an indigenous Australian language, spoken by a handful of people in Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory.
Research interests
Coverbs and complex predicates
I began this ARC-funded project in 2005 in collaboration with Mengistu Amberber (UNSW) and Mark Harvey (Newcastle). We will be setting up a site devoted to this project shortly.
Audio-text linking online
This is a continuation of my postdoctoral fellowship at Sydney University, awarded in 1999 under the Australian Research Council's 'Strategic Partnerships with Industry, Research and Training' (SPIRT) scheme. The project was called 'Indigenous spoken interaction - research and application'. My industry partner was Diwurruwurru-jaru Aboriginal Corporation (DAC; the Katherine Language Centre), with whom I've had a long and productive association.
The project aims to take an electronic approach to the issue of how best to present and archive indigenous language so that the focus is less on the written word, and more on spoken, interactive material.
To this end, I have been working with speakers of indigenous languages in the Roper River area collecting interactive material (dialogues, collaborative discussions and stories, traditional uses for plants and animals, arguments, gossip) with the aim of creating an electronic audio archive which can be accessed through a database including dictionary and text components.
This tool ideally can be used both as a language archive, to store language material for future use, and as a resource for teaching indigenous languages in schools.
In its involvement with language teaching in schools, DAC has continually run into the problem of low literacy abilities among the (usually elderly) people who volunteer as language experts in the classroom.
The archive, with its emphasis on audio material, aims to alleviate this problem, without providing necessarily the best answer. The 'research' component of this project will focus on the formal and referential characteristics of interactive language, an area which is still poorly represented in the linguistics literature on Australian languages.
Referentiality in Australian languages
This is a issue which has concerned me for a long time but I'm only now starting to understand the theory behind the questions. I will be working more in-depth on this question during fieldwork this year on Wubuy.
Publications
Morphology/phonology
- 'Word Structure in Ngalakgan'. 1999. (PhD thesis)
- 'Word structure in Australian languages' (with Mark Harvey). 2003. (Draft version of the paper published in the Australian Journal of Linguistics 23, 1:3-34.)
- 'Evidence for the sub-group Ngalakgan-Rembarrnga within Gunwinyguan' (Long version of a paper presented at the 25th International Conference of Historical Linguistics, Melbourne, 2001. Now published as 'Stem forms and paradigm reshaping in Gunwinyguan.' In Claire Bowern and Harold Koch (eds) Subgrouping in Australian languages. 2004. John Benjamins. 313-340.)
- Appendices:
- 1. Ngalakgan-Rembarrnga verb paradigms
- 2. Ngandi-Nunggubuyu verb paradigms
- 3. Ngkn-Rmba-Ngdi pronominal prefixes
- 'Noun class disagreement in Ngalakgan'. 2002. (Draft of a paper published in a special volume of Sprachtypologie und Forschungen 'Problems of Polysynthesis', ed. by Nick Evans and Hans-Juergen Sasse. Akademie Verlag: Berlin.)
- The domain of phonological processes. 2005. (Draft of a paper presented at the Australian Linguistics Society annual conference 2004, to be published in online proceedings.)
Referentiality
- 'I'm going to where her backbone is: placenames in the Roper'. 2002. (Draft version of chapter published in 'The Land is a Map' edited by Luise Hercus, Flavia Hodges, and Jane Simpson. Pacific Linguistics: Canberra. )
- 'The interpretation of complex nominal expressions in two Northern Australian languages'. 2004. (Draft of a paper to be published in a collected volume edited by Ilana Mushin and myself with the provisional title of 'Discourse and grammar in Australian languages')