The National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) is a research center for ethnology and cultural anthropology.

Seminars, Symposia, and Academic Conferences

Friday, January 31, 2020
Fijian Languages Symposium

  • Date: Friday January 31, 2020　14:00 - 17:00
  • Venues: Room 3.08 Geography Building Massey University, Palmerston North New Zealand
  • Language: English
  • Open to the public
  • Relevant Project:
    A Joint International Collaborative Research (B) “Integrating Language Change in Time and Space: Applying Geographical Information System (GIS) and Statistic Modelling to Historical Linguistics” (2019–2023, PI: Kikusawa) funded by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
  • E-mail：fijigis●minpaku.ac.jp (please replace●with @)
 

About This Symposium

This symposium is organized as a venue for presenting on-going research dealing with studies of Fijian languages and culture. Stemming from an initial project aimed at mapping of Fijian Communalects (dialects) using a geographic information system (GIS), the research has extended to be more interdisciplinary involving not only linguistics and geography, but cultural anthropology and computational linguistics (machine learning). This symposium is open to students, staff and the public and provides an opportunity to ask questions or make comments to the presenters about their research, and in particular to discuss ways of sharing it with interested academic and public communities. All presentations are 15 minutes with 5 minutes reserved for questions or comments. Satellite workshops will be held after the symposium (February 1- 2) exclusively with project members, to further discuss technical matters related to the project.

 

Program

14：00 - 14：10 Welcome (Russell Prince)—and about the project (Ritsuko Kikusawa)
14：10 - 14：30 Fiji Language Maps: How they were made and how to read them. (Paul Geraghty, School of Language, Arts & Media, The University of the South Pacific, Fiji).
14：30 - 14：50 The Nasarowaqa communalect. (Apolonia Tamata, iTaukie Trust Fund Board, Fiji)
14：50 - 15：10 Interactive web maps: Data exploration vs. thematic atlas. (John Lowry, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University).
15：10 - 15：30 Linguistic mapping and historical analyses: Vertical and horizontal transmission and potential GIS applications (Ritsuko Kikusawa, National Museum of Ethnology, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan).
15：30 - 15：50 Break
15：50 - 16：10 Relaxing the tree constraint (Yugo Murawaki, Department of Intelligence Science and Technology, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University).
16：10 - 16：30 Kinship term in Fiji Sign Language: A comparison with the Fijian Language (Fumiya Sano, Kyoto University).
16：30 - 16：50 Possessive construction in Vatulele Fijian (Susumu Okamto, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies).
16：50 - 17：00 Closing remarks—(John Lowry)