This means that students have a wide choice of topics to study within Linguistics.

Research
The Linguistics Department at the University of Canterbury has achieved a high reputation for its research. There are two kinds of research grants in New Zealand - those awarded for purely curiosity- driven research, and Government grants for contracts for applied research with useful or relevant outcomes. Marsden Grants are awarded by the Royal Society of New Zealand and are the major source of academic funding in New Zealand for curiosity driven research.

Marsden awards to two professors in 2000
In recent years researchers in the Department have been given four Marsden Grants out of their four applications in their category. Two awards were made in the year 2000 to Professor Lyle Campbell and Professor Elizabeth Gordon.

The Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE)
ONZE is the largest current research project in the department.

Elizabeth Gordon who is leading the project outlined the thrust of the research.
"It is looking at the origin and evolution of the New Zealand accent. There are two different ways of looking at it. Why do we speak the way we do? Why is New Zealand English the way it is?

"This work began about the end of the 1980s with small pieces of research but has been fully funded since 1994. Since that point it has had a lot of impetus. We had support from the Public Good Science Fund for two years, and now we are working under a three year grant from the Marsden Fund.

"The basis of the research project is really one of those very lucky things which every researcher dreams of - where you get a gift. Our gift was discovering a big archive of recordings collected in the 1940s. The Mobile Disc Recording Unit of the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation had the brilliant idea of using equipment that had been used during the war to send messages back from the service men and women on active service to their families at home."

In the 1940s all broadcasting came from Wellington and people in places like Southland and Otago were complaining that they were never represented. The mobile recording equipment was still working and the staff of the unit took it around rural areas of New Zealand and collected pioneer reminiscences among other material. They were trying to get audio snapshots of small towns, so they got a lot of music, such as the local pipe band, someone reciting, an interview with the Mayor, and interviews with old people who told their stories. For the researchers working on ONZE these reminiscences are the most important part of the material. The oldest of the three hundred people recorded was born in 1851 in Dunedin - an incredible piece of research material.

"They were soft recordings and they were not played back so the old people never heard themselves unless they heard them on the radio."

As Lyle Campbell said, "What is really remarkable for us is that because these are really old people we in fact have a recorded history of nearly the entire sequence of New Zealand speech. The accent in New Zealand has changed rather markedly from the early colonial days until now. We are the envy of the world because we have physical recordings of the entire sequence, whereas other people have to reconstruct it from written documents or try to guess what the accent was in the past based on what it is today."

The recordings on huge aluminium based vulcanite discs were in danger of disintegrating, but the staff at the Linguistics Department have managed to preserve them. The University of Canterbury gave the Department a grant of $10,000 (including $2,000 from the Macmillan Brown Trust) and with that money the staff managed to make a copy of everything. First the recordings were put on analogue tape, but staff are now putting it on DAT tape, and hope eventually to put it on CDRs (CD recordables).

A lot of the material has been transcribed, which means not only that the material can be read but also that cross referencing from the written to the oral form is a straightforward process. For instance, if the researcher is looking for the pronunciation of 'grown' (as spelt or as 'growen') the word can be found by the computer and accessed on the spoken recording.

A historian employed by the Department worked at Births, Deaths and Marriages at Lower Hutt and looked up the history and parentage of the speakers. Were they New Zealand born and where did their parents come from? This information of course was vital for the research work on the accent. The stories people tell on the tapes also give a lot of demographic information.

A team has been working on this - Professor Elizabeth Gordon, Dr Margaret Maclagan from the Speech and Language Therapy Department, Professor Campbell, two Post-Doctoral Fellows, and students working as research assistants over the summer, when funding permits.

The ONZE team - (L to R) Dr Margaret Maclagan, Associate Professor Elizabeth Gordon, Dr Jen Hay (Postdoctoral Fellow), Betsy la Cruz (wife of visiting NZODA trainee Erwin la Cruz), Erwin la Cruz (NZODA trainee), Stacey Nicholas (Project Manager of ONZE), Professor Lyle Campbell. Click here for a larger version

Linguists visiting the Department from overseas
Lyle Campbell is enthusiastic about the number of linguists who have come from other countries to work in the Department.
"Because the project is exciting to sociolinguistics the Department gets a large number of visitors, including most of the really prominent sociolinguists, who have come under a Fellowship, a teaching stint or even just for a week to look at what is being done. People are booking up well in advance to visit the Department."

The eminent linguist William Labov visited the Department and gave a lot of help with setting up the project.

Peter Trudgill, a leading British sociolinguist and dialectologist now based at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, visits the Department annually and works on the ONZE data for a month. He plans to spend longer in 2001. His association with the project has increased its mana, and his visit is a great experience for the students who use his book as a reference work and for the student who has done a thesis based on his theories.

In the year 2000 Erwin la Cruz, a young phonetician from Venezuela, came to the Department for three months supported by a grant from the New Zealand Overseas Development Training Fund. He found the Department's website and applied to work on ONZE.

Professor Lyle Campbell's Marsden funded research project
A second Marsden project is called 'How to show that languages are related' "The title sounds simple, but in fact it is a very controversial and very active area in linguistics these days because of attempts to make relationships among languages that are not known to be related, and so all the methods, arguments, politics and romantic feelings come into it."

A number of people are working on this topic, including some Canterbury graduate students.

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy has just ended his Marsden-funded research. His was on the origins and evolution of language, published recently in a book from Oxford University Press.

Michael Dukes is working on Tongan syntax and grammar and research students are working on theses on that topic.

Small Austronesian languages are another area of current research. In this very large family there are more than a thousand languages - including Polynesian, Melanesian, and Micronesian languages and others as far north as Formosa, but not the Papuan languages of New Guinea. The University of Canterbury has given some small grants to support work on specific languages, and students have done Masters theses on them. Students have worked on Bima from Sumbawa in Indonesia and on Tetum, the principal language of East Timor. Linguistic materials drawn from research into Tetum have been of some relevance for the New Zealand peacekeepers in East Timor.

The merger of ear and air
Elizabeth Gordon and phonetician Dr Margaret Maclagan from the Speech and Language Therapy Department have been working on the ear / air project for fifteen years. Elizabeth talked about it.
"It began when we recorded 120 fourth formers from four different schools. There were equal numbers of boys and girls and the sample was balanced for social class with the choice of state schools from two different areas in Christchurch and a boys' and a girls' private school. Pupils were asked to read a range of sentences and words, but what we were looking at was the merger of the diphthongs in the words near and square."

Elizabeth makes a marked difference in the pronunciation of the vowels involved, but students now pronounce them in the same way, so the name ear / air is meaningless to them.

Elizabeth continued, "The recording tests have been repeated every five years, so that we have managed to track this merger and trace its story from the point where the majority of people kept them separate to where now they merge them. Pupils in all the schools have ended up merging the vowels, but the speed at which they get there is determined by the school and by whether they are boys or girls. The conclusion is that the merger process is affected by social factors, but the end result is not."

Lyle observed that while this could be seen by the uninitiated as one tiny linguistic fact there are many publications on it from other places in New Zealand and around the world. The Department's Post Doctoral Fellow Jen Hay, who is a New Zealander, is now doing research on the perception of the merger and on whether people can now hear the difference between ear and air.

In another five years another set of recordings will be made to ascertain what has happened in the interim.

Defence strategies for endangered languages
Professor Campbell and Joan Smith-Kocamahhul (linguistics PhD student) are working on another research project, supported by a grant from the University of Canterbury, aimed at determining defence strategies for endangered languages. Languages are becoming extinct at an alarming rate which makes language endangerment the area of the greatest current concern to linguists. This project aims at determining and assessing strategies and methods used around the world in projects aimed at stabilising or revitalising threatened languages with the goal of providing a resource for linguists, policy makers, and communities engaged in defending and strengthening languages; it potentially will be of considerable relevance in New Zealand for efforts to revitalise Te Reo Maori.

Course in New Zealand English
For this course students have to collect data - a process which teaches them about doing fieldwork and professional analysis. This also provides the Department with additional data. With their wide range of contacts in different age and social groups the students provide a wide range of recordings. The knowledge that their recordings will be kept and used for serious research helps to fire their enthusiasm. These recordings now total 360 - a growing resource.

Enrolments
The student numbers are high and Elizabeth considers that this is partly because they work closely with the staff and feel involved with the research.

Students come from a wide range of disciplines. Because Linguistics is in both the arts and science faculties students come sometimes to combine their studies with a language degree and sometimes to take the subject as a filler without being sure what it involves. Some of them get hooked and stay in the Department and major in Linguistics. Some linguistics units are cross-coded with subjects in English and philosophy. For instance Linguistics 101 is also English 123 and can be credited to either department.

Awards to staff in the Department
Lyle Campbell has twice won the Bloomfield award of the Linguistic Society of America for the best book in linguistics published in the last two years, and has recently been awarded the University of Canterbury Research Medal.

Professor Lyle Campbell.

For more information about this highly motivated department go to the Website.
www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz
or email
linguistics@ling.canterbury.ac.nz

To read more about the University of Canterbury go to; Studying Classics At The University Of Canterbury
How Accessible Is Tertiary Education To Maori?
Christchurch, The Garden City, In Spring
From Flat Farm Paddock To Landscaped Campus
Ilam Gardens The Home Of World Famous Azaleas And Rhododendrons