ALS 2022 and OzSpace Writing Retreat

The OzSpace team had a fantastic week at the 2022 conference of the Australian Linguistic Society at the University of Melbourne. During the conference, we heard from team members Laurits Stapput Knudsen about work on the structural status of spatial expressions, Joe Blythe about the rotating scene machine, Bill Palmer on spatial terms in Meryam Mir, Jayden Macklin-Cordes about word-initial apical neutralisation in Warlmanpa, and Eleanor Yacopetti on contact with Kriol in Kune spatial language data. Along with papers from other researchers, there was a whole day on space. It was great to attend the first in-person ALS since COVID disruptions and catch up on exciting research by colleagues from around the world.

Following the conference, several team members travelled to Warburton in regional Victoria, for a four-day retreat to workshop the project’s analysis schema. Since data collection is underway for several languages in the project, we have begun to make key decisions about comparative methods. Tom Ennever trialled the coding schema on Kukatja data, and Eleanor on Kune data, while Jayden and Laurits developed workflows for efficient data transfer from ELAN for statistical analysis. Jayden’s expertise in R coding was a great help for this, and we’re happy that he’s now joined the team in Australia.

We also spent a day reviewing project findings so far and writing abstracts for upcoming conferences in 2023. More info to come!

Team members on the OzSpace Writing Retreat (L-R): Eleanor Yacopetti, Laurits Stapput Knudsen, Tom Ennever, Thomas Poulton and Jayden Macklin-Cordes.

Many thanks to Thomas Poulton for his support in organising the writing retreat.