Events at the Jakarta Field Station

2010 Schedule

For further information or if you would like to attend any event, please email John Bowden at <john.bowden AT jakartafield.org> or Thomas J. Conners at <oranghutan AT cbn.net.id>.

Events: Occasional Colloquia Series | Language Workshop | Typology Workshop

Occasional Colloquia Series

The Occasional Colloquia Series provides an opportunity for visiting scholars and researchers to present their research to a small, informal forum of linguists and other interested persons at the JFS. Scholars, both resident in Jakarta/Indonesia, and those passing through are invited to present any aspect of their work, ranging from initial works-in-progress to completed projects ready for publication or already published.

The Colloquia Series is held on an ad hoc basis, as the opportunity for presentations arises. The talks are held at the Jakarta Field Station, Atma Jaya University, and are open to all interested participants, though the nature of the series is informal. Announcements are made on the JFS website and distributed through an email list of interested persons in the Jakarta area.

Talks are generally scheduled for a very flexible one hour duration, split between presentation and a question/answer period. Facilities for power point, ohp, video, or any other presentation materials are available.

Talks are given primarily in English.

Language Workshop

The JFS has projects running on many different languages of Indonesia. The Language Workshops are casual meetings that focus on one particular language (or group of languages/dialects), and provide the opportunity for participants to work with ‘raw' data in that language. Though the actual format of any given Workshop is variable, and will be determined by the researcher most closely associated with that language, the general structure of the workshop will have a researcher present a very general overview of the language under investigation, including, but not limited to:

• Sociolinguistic information
• Geographical spread
• Basic overview of the grammar (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon)
• State of research on the language

The bulk of the workshop, however, focuses on raw data. The researcher prepares simple coded (glossed, transcribed) texts in the language, and the workshop goes over the texts together. For those languages under investigation at the JFS, this means simply taking a selection of already coded texts from Kweza/MasterFM to explore during the workshop.

Any researcher is welcome to propose a workshop on any language (for example in addition to or in place of a Colloquium talk), but the proposer must minimally be able to provide coded texts that will make up the bulk of the workshop.

Workshops can last anywhere from half a day to a full day. The nature of the workshops is very informal, and the goal is provide the opportunity for interested persons to work with raw data in a given language or group of languages/dialects.

The schedule for early 2010 is currently as follows:

			| Presentation material
20 Jan 2010	Langkat Malay	Dalan Mehuli	| pdf & related audio files (6MB)
27 Jan 2010	Banten Javanese	Singgih Sugianto	| pdf
24 Feb 2010	Semandang (Land Dayak)	Nadia Indriana	| pdf
Date TBA	Helong	John Bowden

Depending on the participants, Workshops can be conducted in English, Indonesian, or a mix.

Typology Workshop

Where the language workshops focus on a particular language or group of related languages, the typology workshops focus on a particular linguistic phenomenon and how it functions in different languages from Indonesia (and beyond). For each meeting, a particular phenomenon is selected, and participants are asked to explore this phenomenon in the language(s) with which they are most familiar, asking some very basic questions:

• Does the phenomenon exist in your language?
• What is the form of the phenomenon in your language?
• What is the distribution of the phenomenon in your language?
• What is the function of the phenomenon in your language?

The Seminars meet weekly, for one half to one hour, during which some particular aspect of the phenomenon under discussion is examined in all of the languages of which the participants have knowledge. Different aspects of a particular phenomenon may be examined over subsequent weeks.

Proposed topics for the 2010 series include: voice systems (symmetric vs. asymmetric, form, function); applicatives (semantic vs. syntactic, form, distribution, function); spatial relations (expression, verbal, prepositions, coordinate systems); attribution (types, predicate, genitive, forms); clitics (form, function, syntax); and word order issues.

The typology workshop will begin in mid-January, 2010, and meets every Monday, at 1:00 p.m. in the JFS.

The workshops are also informal, and are generally in-house in nature, as such, discussions are held primarily in Indonesian.

*** Beginning in January 2010, the first and ongoing series of workshops in the typology series will focus on Valency Classes in Jakartan Indonesian.

The valency workshop is running in conjunction with a project on the typology of valency classes in verbs coordinated by the MPI EVA Department of Linguistics. More information on that project can be found here: http://wwwstaff.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/ValencyClasses.pdf.

For the Jakarta project, we are working with a slightly enlarged list of meanings, which include items that in Jakartan and many Indonesian languages behave predicatively and have interesting interactions with valency altering affixes. That list is available here: valency_project_meanings_list.pdf.