“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”Pretty sure Shakespeare was talking about the ALAA/ALS joint conference day.
The really great thing about attending not one but two linguistics conferences at the same time is finding out the amazing scope of linguistics, all the different things that we do in this big crazy family.
The tricky part is attending all these different sessions and not changing your phd topic afterwards.
For example, children’s pointing gestures in Murrinhpatha. There’s a whole area of study of the development of how we point at things, and there seem to be some “universals” like using your index finger, but then is this really a universal? In some language groups, people point with an open palm, or with an eyebrow, or with their lip. Apparently “nobody” points with their middle finger but that’s not a universal either (linguists probably ought to stop using words like “universals”, “everybody”, and “nobody”). Arrernte speakers for example use their middle finger for pointing, according to David Wilkins, and according to Barbara Kelly’s group it seems that Murrinhpatha kids do it as well.
This is a really interesting observation to me because I’m sure I’ve seen vaguely white English-speaking kids occasionally use their middle finger for pointing, to the chagrin of their parents, and certainly there are whole internet forums of parents who are worried about how they can stop their child from pointing with their middle-finger lest they be read as rude - but the point (so to speak) seems to be that this kind of finger-pointing isn’t a transmitted behaviour. That is, English-speaking kids don’t learn to point with their middle-finger from their parents, they just do it almost by accident.
So first of all, is this actually something English-speaking kids sometimes do? And if it is, does it have the same (morphological) properties as Arrernte and Murrinhpatha pointing? And if this is the case but it isn’t transmitted, would we characterise it as sort of the finger-pointing equivalent of a kid having the potential to produce all the sounds of the world and then having their phonetic inventory shaped by the language they’re exposed to? Hmm…!!
The plenary keynote was from Asif Agha, about ‘money talk’ - how we talk about money, but more importantly how how we talk about money makes money money - if you see what I mean. Objects (coins, notes, shells, salt) function as money only if other people do the same things with them, and the act of using them as money makes them so. I’m not going to pretend to understand anything more about discursive semiotics (there are more things in heaven…), but I will just speak to something I do have authority on, which is that Sir Edmund Hillary, as he appears on the New Zealand five dollar note, was A Bit Of A Babe:
A great set of sessions in the afternoon about Indigenous languages: the (sometimes sordid) history of language policy, the national curriculum, and the affordances and constraints that places on bilingual education in the NT (Samantha Disbray - Charles Darwin University); trends in Indigenous language usage which turned into a fascinating conversation about how you would even collect language use data in the Australian census (not least considering the last time we had a census; remember that?) (Maria Karidakis - University of Melbourne); and the creating of an online 'shell' (like a basic framework into which you can add content for any language) for Indigenous language and culture sharing (Cathy Bow - Charles Darwin University).
Thinking about the online language programme created for Bininj Kunuwok, surely one of the biggest challenges language teachers face is how to teach polysynthetic languages in a way that doesn’t frighten people. Here I wonder if we’d be better avoiding grammatical or linguistic description all together and just presenting example after example until students start to internalise the patterns. I have a sticky note on my office wall that says “the brain is a pattern detector, not a rule applier” (which has been attributed to Patricia Cunningham), and this was the mantra of the 'Say Something In' language learning course I used - “don’t worry about it now, you’ll get it”. But of course people do worry about it now, and feel that it would help them to be able to see the rule spelled out in front of them. I think we need to see a lot more research about whether adult language learners really are helped by learning grammar explicitly, or whether they just think they’re helped by it.
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