ANU Tone Workshop

Workshop on Studying Tone Languages in New Guinea: elicitation, analysis, and archiving
Australian National University, Canberra, 4-16 December 2011
http://www.toneworkshop.org/anu-workshop
Organizers: Mark Donohue (host), Larry Hyman, Steven Bird, Mark Liberman
Participants include: Tony Woodbury, Keith Snider, Bert Remijsen

The goal of this workshop is to advance the study of New Guinea tone languages, by applying practical wisdom gained from investigating tone languages in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.  The workshop extends the work of the Berkeley Tone Workshop, which consolidated a variety of methods for documenting, describing, and analyzing tone languages.  It will be held in the context of Canberra LangFest 2011.

Participants will learn how to describe and analyse a tone language through practical experience, working with native speakers from West Papua (Indonesia) and from Papua New Guinea.  Workshop sessions will involve:
  • "master classes" in first elicitation, in which the class will observe experienced tonologists guiding a student in eliciting data from an informant, followed by reflections and class discussion
  • lectures on the analysis of tone, covering phonological, phonetic, typological, and computational approaches
  • training in language documentation methodologies, and digital recording and archiving technologies appropriate for the study of tone
Participants will work in small groups to refine the description and analysis of the tone system of their selected language.  They will contribute to a draft paper on the phonology and phonetics of tone in this language, and will be identified as co-author on a chapter in an edited collection.

On most days, the workshop program will be organized as follows:
  • mornings: two 90-minute elicitation sessions with a language informant, guided by one of the workshop organizers with one of the participants
  • afternoons: 90-minute discussion of methodologies (with 1-1 informant sessions in parallel, for broader elicitation), followed by a further 90-minute elicitation session and a group discussion
Many sessions will be open to onlookers.  Please note that space for full participants will be limited.  We will need both categories of participant to register so that we can book appropriate venues.

Tone Language Session at ALS

On Sunday 4 December, there will be a series of presentations concerning tone at the annual meeting of the Australian Linguistics Society, including a plenary presentation by Larry Hyman.

Venues

For more information...

Please bookmark this page, or subscribe to our mailing list, to be sure of receiving further announcements.  Instructions about registration and accommodation will be available in May.
A sampling of the topics to be covered can be found in the workshop notes from the Berkeley meeting.
Supported by NSF Project: "Prosodic Systems in New Guinea: Integrating computational and typological approaches to linguistic analysis" (Mark Liberman, Steven Bird, Larry Hyman, Mark Donohue).

Subpages (1): Program (provisional)
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