Hello all!
This week’s Sydney Friday seminar is from Anna Crane, 4pm Sydney time Friday
22nd October.
Although lockdown has just wrapped up for most of Sydney, it hasn’t yet for the
universities, so we’ll still be online, but hopefully we will be able to come
together face to face again in not too long.
The link is: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84093744071
All welcome. Below is the abstract and the schedule for the semester.
Yaegan
Speaking with spirits and each other: interpersonal meaning in Gija
In 2005 I began working with Gija people in the Kimberley worried about losing
their language. Their efforts to stem its loss are part of larger global
movement of language revitalization. ‘Revitalization’ is a term used to refer
to ways in which speakers of languages impacted by colonisation work to reclaim
knowledge about their languages and strengthen their use (Amery & Gale 2008,
Grenoble & Whaley, 2006, p.13). The term can apply to a broad spectrum of
experiences from waking up sleeping languages to languages like Gija that still
have mother tongue speakers (Hobson, 2010). Gija elders fluent in the language,
younger Gija adults and finally linguists such as myself all act as both
learners and teachers at different points in the revitalization process. This
seminar explores my role and describes a spiritually and pragmatically
important Gija practice of mantha – a genre for welcoming outsiders to Country.
I will detail how I have gone about investigating the language resources used
for this purpose. My academic training in Systemic Functional Linguistics has
led me to apply the stratified, metafunctionally organised model of language in
social context proposed by Martin (1992), building upon the work of Halliday
(Halliday 1961, 1993). I will use the mantha genre to take you on a top-down
tour of interpersonal metafunction in Gija. This research forms part of an in
progress doctoral project and documents how I am collaborating with teachers
and learners revitalising Gija.
Amery, R., & Gale, M. (2008). But our language was just asleep: a history of
language revival in Australia. In W. B. McGregor (Ed.), Encountering Aboriginal
languages: studies in the history of Australian linguistics (pp. 339-382).
Canberra: Pacific Linguistics
Grenoble, L., & Whaley, L. (2006). Saving languages : an introduction to
language revitalization . Cambridge University Press
Halliday, M.A.K. (1961). Categories of the theory of grammar. Word 17. 241–292.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1993). Towards a language-based theory of learning.
Linguistics and Education, 5(2), 93–116.
Hobson, J. (2010). Re-awakening languages: theory and practice in the
revitalisation of Australia’s indigenous languages. Sydney University Press.
Martin, J. (1992). English text : system and structure. John Benjamins
Publishing Co.
Date
Presenter
Topic
13th August
Jim Martin
Construing entities: types of structure
20th August
Ed McDonald
Back to the future: Descriptive adequacy in Halliday’s The Language of the
Chinese "Secret History of the Mongols"
27th August
Dragana Stosic
An axial perspective on Serbian nominal groups
3rd September
Yaegan Doran
Factoring out structure: Nuclearity, linearity and iteration
10th September
Geoff Williams
Semantic variation theory as appliable linguistics: Exploring contexts for
melanoma treatment.
17th September
Helen Caple & Ping Tian
Analysing the representation of diversity in early childhood picture books:
Challenges for multimodal discourse analysis
24th September
Mary Macken-Horarik
Building a knowledge structure in school English: Troubles and (potential)
triumphs
Mid-semester break
(ASFLA)
8th October
Sally Humphrey & Dragana Stosic
Towards a social semiotic perspective on Health Literacy
15th October
Xiaoqin Wu
Articulating social discourse and enacting spatial pedagogy: A multifaceted
understanding of rhythm and space
22nd October
Anna Crane
Interpersonal meaning in Gija: contributing understandings to revitalisation
programs
29th October
Bev Derewianka
Recontextualising a pedagogical grammar from theory to classroom practice
5th November
Alison Moore
#Recover South Coast: social media in bushfire recovery
12th November
Thu Ngo
Functions of film sounds from the systemic functional semiotics perspective
Y. J. DORAN
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
