Previous Workshops

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION SERIES (Room D003-017, The Cairns Institute - between 1530 hrs and 1730 hrs)

Members of the LCRC will give a semi-formal talk on an area of grammar. Participants will have the opportunity to give and receive feedback, and discuss the topic together. These are designed for students to be able to attend and be involved, and are planned to be held in person and via Zoom.

Attendance registration and Zoom details please contact: nathan.white1@jcu.edu.au

Monday 27 September 2021 -  Dr Alex Walker  Language Revitalisation and Fragmented Languages: Recovering the Chhé’ee Fokaa Language

Monday 25  October 2021 - Dr Nathan White - Secundative Alignment and Passivisation in Yowlumne

Monday 22 November 2021 - Dr Luca Ciucci -  Reconstructing a rarum: the Proto-Zamucoan nominal suffixation

INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM SERIES (Room D003-017, The Cairns Institute - between 1530 hrs and 1730 hrs)

Speakers will be invited to give a formal talk on grammar or discourse from a language of interest. These are designed for students, staff and overseas adjunct faculty to attend, and are planned to be held in person and via Zoom.

Attendance registration and Zoom details please contact: nathan.white1@jcu.edu.au

Monday 11 October 2021 -  Guest  Speaker  Dr Tim Henry-Rodriguez – California State University, Fullerton (Fullerton, USA)  – Phonetic Reconstruction in Purisimeño Chumash

Monday 8 November 2021 -  Guest Speaker Edmundo Luna – Kyushu University (Fukuoka, Japan) - On the Old Javanese Discourse Particles ta, pwa, and t: A Usage-based Perspective

Monday  6 December 2021 - Guest Speaker Don Daniels – University of Oregon (Eugene, USA) **NOTE this will be held in D3-003**  - Semi-embedded Clauses in Aisa: Discourse and Diachrony Zoom link and details for this session - contact neil.alexander.walker@gmail.com

ROTATING WORKSHOP SERIES (Room D003-017, The Cairns Institute - between 1530 hrs and 1730 hrs)

Members of the LCRC and Linguistic students will give updates on their ongoing work, present analytical problems or other discoveries of interest, and get ideas and feedback from colleagues. These are planned to be in-person gatherings only.

Attendance registration, please contact: nathan.white1@jcu.edu.au

Monday 18 October 2021 -  Dr Alex Walker - Indigenous Rememberers  in Northern California

Monday 1 November 2021 - Dr Luca Ciucci - Did Old Zamuco Have Parahypotaxis? New Evidence from Historical Data

Monday 15 November 2021 - Dr Nathan White - Hmong-Mien and Austroasiatic "Contact"

Monday 29 November 2021 - Robert Bradshaw - A Typology of Frustrative Marking in New Guinea Languages

Dates: 25-27 November 2020, JCU Cairns

Organizers: Luca Ciucci, Rob Bradshaw, Pema Wangdi, Alexandra Aikhenvald

To be held at The Cairns Institute (D3), James Cook University, 14-88 McGregor Road, Smithfield, QLD 4878

More information

13–14 de noviembre de 2020

(An online conference on the languages of Chiquitania co-organized by the Language and Culture Research Centre)

further information

Group Photo of attendees

Group Photo, International Workshop 'Possession and Ownership', JCU, 2010

Key From Left to Right:
Back Row:
Prof Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Prof Isabelle Bril, Dr Felix Ameka, Dr Tianqiao (Mike) lu, Prof Lev Michael, Dr Yongxian Luo, Dr Michael Wood
Middle Row:
Dr Anne Schwarz, Associate Prof. Rosita Henry, Prof Anne Storch, Dr Gloria Gravelle, Dr Mark Post
Front Row:
Prof Sasha Aikhenvald, Prof Bob Dixon, Elena Rhind, Prof Alan Dench

Intensive block course for graduate and postgraduate candidates

When faced with people at your field site who speak a language different from your own, how to proceed?

JCU’s Language and Culture Research Centre (LCRC) will run the highly successful Linguistic Skills for Ethnographic Research Masterclass on 5-6 April 2018 at JCU Cairns (Room D3.144, The Cairns Institute).

This free two-day workshop may be credited towards the elective component of RD7003: Professional Development.

Organised by Dr Kasia Wojtylak, the masterclass will host invited speakers Dr Alex Walker, Dr Luca Ciucci, and PhD students in linguistics Abe Bai Junwei and Nathan White.

The course has been designed for anthropologists and other researchers who conduct fieldwork in areas where non-written and lesser-known languages are spoken. It will introduce candidates to reasons why competency in the local language could be important to their research, and give them introductory concrete, practical methods for language learning and linguistic documentation.

Interested candidates should contact Dr Kasia Wojtylak by email to katarzyna.wojtylak@jcu.edu.au by 20 March 2018.

Masterclass Program

Day 1 | Thurs 5 April 2018

  • 0900-1030 Introduction to language, linguistics, and fieldwork research (Kasia Wojtylak)
  • 1030-1100 Break
  • 1100-1230 Language sounds and the IPA (Luca Ciucci)
  • 1230-1330 Break
  • 1330-1400 Monolingual demonstration with speaker of non-European language (Kasia Wojtylak)
  • 1400-1530 Introduction to morphological analysis (Kasia Wojtylak)
  • 1530-1600 Break
  • 1600-1700 Further discussion of practical field techniques related to the day's topics (Kasia Wojtylak)

Day 2 | Fri 6 April 2018

  • 0900-1030 How phonology relates to phonetics (Alex Walker)
  • 1030-1100 Break
  • 1100-1230 Understanding syntax (Nathan White)
  • 1230-1330 Break
  • 1330-1430 Interesting topics in linguistics: genders and noun class markers, evidentiality, case marking (Kasia Wojtylak and Abe Bai Junwei)
  • 1430-1500 Analysis of undescribed language morphology (Kasia Wojtylak)
  • 1500-1530 Break
  • 1530-1600 Ethics of linguistic fieldwork (Kasia Wojtylak)
  • 1600-1700 Existing software for dictionary building and language analysis (Abe Bai Junwei)
  • 1700-1730 Summary, addressing individual questions, and wrap-up (Kasia Wojtylak)

News and photos from the April 2018 workshop

You are faced with people at your field site who speak a language different from your own: how to proceed?

The LCRC ran the highly successful Linguistic Skills for Ethnographic Field Research Masterclass on 5-6 April 2018 at The Cairns Institute, JCU.

The Masterclass, organised and run by Dr Kasia Wojtylak, also included lectures by LCRC linguists, Dr Alex Walker, Dr Luca Ciucci, and the PhD students, Bai Junwei (Abe) and Nathan White.

The course was designed for anthropologists and other researchers who conduct fieldwork in areas where non-written and lesser-known languages are spoken. The course introduced students to reasons why competency in the local language could be important to their research, and gave them introductory concrete, practical methods for linguistic research.

Masterclass topics included:

  • introduction to language
  • language sounds
  • morphological analysis
  • syntax
  • ethics of linguistic fieldwork, and
  • demonstration of software for dictionary-building and language-analysis.

Nathan White, together with Bai Junwei, led a special event during the course – a monolingual demonstration with a speaker of non-European language – or, in other words – what do you do when you meet someone and you have no language in common? The workshop sparked a series of vibrant conversations among students discussing intricacies of the grammatical systems of world’s languages.

See the photos here.

Special workshop convened by the LCRC and the University of Augsburg

Download Program and Abstracts (PDF, 952 KB)

Start Date: 11th Jul 2018 1:45pm
End Date: 12th Jul 2018 5:30pm

Special workshop - 'Word': Its manifestations and functions

Download Program (PDF, 222 KB)

See the photos here.

Start Date: 3rd Oct 2018 9:30am
End Date: 4th Oct 2018 5:30pm