Outreach | Nominal Categorisation

Optimal Categorisation

Current Project

Optimal Categorisation: the origin and nature of gender from a psycholinguistic perspective.

Grammatical gender is perplexing concept that has raised an abundance of questions around its origin, impact and the classification of entities in various languages. With the primary question being: Why are there so many different categorisation systems?

People

Learn more about members of the project, including:

Researchers

Stakeholders

Consultants

Languages

With the objective to investigate the formation and development of gender in language and its interplay with cognition, six interconnected languages have been selected with distinctive possessive classifier systems. The sample of Oceanic languages encompass those spoken in Vanuatu and New Caledonia.

Experiments

To further comprehend the nature and origin of grammatical gender six psycholinguistic experiments have been developed. These experiments investigate classifier systems within the six oceanic languages, collecting data to investigate our hypotheses.

Outreach

Using our data, with the support of local stakeholders, we are creating vital vernacular literacy materials to help support these endangered languages. We are also interacting with the public to share, explain, and teach about these remarkable varieties of nominal categorisation.

Publications

Our team has published several papers as a result of our research, with other papers being written and reviewed.

Talks

Our researchers have given a number of talks as part of our outreach efforts to share the project findings.

All Projects

In the six South Pacific communities of Vanuatu and New Caledonia we are working with, we are developing much needed vernacular literacy materials together with local stakeholders through our dictionaries and school books.

We are engaging with the general public to explain and educate about these intriguing types of nominal categorisation found in Vanuatu and New Caledonia through articles on the SMG’s blog MORPH and through other engagement activities, such as the ESRC Festival of Social Science.

Blog

We have written articles on MORPH, the Surrey Morphology Group’s blog about language and language change. We write about our Optimal Categorisation project – the classifier systems found in the languages and our experimental methods. We also blog about the languages and cultures of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, and language and linguistics more generally.

Click the link button on the left to view our blogs. There are many interesting blogs to read; to find blogs related to this project, type “Optimal Categorisation” into the search bar.

Dictionaries

Dictionaries were created as part of outreach initiatives to provide vernacular literacy resources, in the hopes that they will aid in the teaching of these endangered languages. Our thematic dictionaries focus on the complex possessive structures found in Oceanic languages. The section on the possessive classifiers is directly informed by our free-listing experiment. We include a teacher’s guide to the grammar of the different possessive constructions in each language. We have worked with local stakeholders in Education in Vanuatu and New Caledonia to edit and refine the dictionaries that are being gifted to local schools in all six language communities.

The dictionaries for North Ambrym (Rral), Vatlongos, Lewo and Iaai are available to download now. Low-resolution PDFs (suitable for sharing online) are available. If you require high-resolutions PDFs (suitable for printing) please email smg@surrey.ac.uk for copies.

School Books

Our simple storybooks, which were produced as a result of our storyboard project, were additional resources for vernacular literacy materials. These are designed to show language learners how flexible their classifier system is by introducing objects used in different ways throughout the simple story to evoke different contexts that result in a change in classifier use.

The storybooks for North Ambrym (Rral), Vatlongos, Merei, Lewo, and Iaai are available to download now. Low-resolution PDFs (suitable for sharing online) are available. If you require high-resolutions PDFs (suitable for printing) please email smg@surrey.ac.uk for copies.

Card Game

As part of our ongoing efforts to create resources for vernacular literacy materials that can be utilised both in school and at home we have produced an innovative card game for Iaai. The game is based on Jeu de sept famille ‘happy families‘.

The cards have illustrations depicting items which belong to different classifier ‘families’. Players have to collect the full set belonging to a classifier ‘family’ to win the game. The card-game and box imprint are available to download. Instructions are in French and Iaai.

Festival of Social Science

We were delighted to take part in the ESRC’s Festival of Social Science in 2020. Due to the festival being digital, we were able to present “How language shapes thought: Categorisation in the South Pacific” to a worldwide audience. You can watch a recording of our talk below along with extra discussions from speakers of North Ambrym and Iaai about how they categorise objects using their possessive classifiers.

Festival of Social Science

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North Ambrym

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Iaai

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Stakeholder Meetings

During Fieldwork in Vanuatu and New Caledonia we met with vernacular literacy stakeholders from Vanuatu and New Caledonia.

In Vanuatu we had the opportunity to discuss our project and how best to create literacy materials based on our findings with Helen Tamtam from the Curriculum Development Unit and Prof. Robert Early from the University of the South Pacific.

Robert Early (L), Michael Franjieh (C) and Helen Tamtam (R) – vernacular literacy stakeholders in Vanuatu

In New Caledonia we met with Wejë Diane Bae from the Iaai-Fagauvea office of the Académie des Langues Kanak and Wedge Camoui from the Hoot ma Whaap office of the Académie des Langues Kanak who introduced us to participants and advised us on the creation of literacy materials.

Meeting with Nêlêmwa community representatives from the Hoot ma Whaap office of the Académie des Langues Kanak in Koumac