TELC meetings 1979-1989
Paul Black, 2014; last adjusted 3 May 2015
Information on these meetings is sketchy, obtained through personal communication,
references to TELC presentations found on the World Wide Web, and, for the 1990
meetings, reports in the two available issues of TELC Talk. In a few cases we were able
to list publications relating to the papers presented; often the papers found on the Web
were listed as being presented at TELC precisely because they had not otherwise been
published. We would appreciate any further information anyone may be able to provide
on meetings during this period or on associated publications.
1979 November meeting
David Zorc presented a paper on a ‘Functor analysis of Yolngu’.
1980 November meeting
David Zorc presented a paper on ‘Northern Territory languages and communities /
communities and languages’. This was the basis for Department of Community
Development (1982).
1981 March 13 meeting
A letter I wrote from Batchelor notes that there was a ‘small conference’ on this date,
and the only conference I can imagine is the first TELC meeting I attended. If it was
indeed the latter, then recall clearly that it was held in the staff-student lounge of the
School of Australian Linguistics, it was attended by some SIL linguists, and I presented
a paper on a topic I can no longer recall.
1982 March 6 meeting
David Zorc presented a paper on a ‘Survey of Yolngu-Matha names’ and apparently
also (unless there was a second meeting the same month) one on a ‘Yolngu-Matha verb
stem classification’.
1983 March 11 meeting
A TELC meeting held at SIL in Darwin was noted in a diary of Kevin Ford (personal
communication).
1984 July 18 meeting
Steve Swartz (SIL) presented a paper on ‘Perfectivity vs. imperfectivity in Warlpiri’.
1984 October 31 meeting
Bill McGregor (SAL) presented a preliminary version of ‘Mood and subordination in
Kuniyanti’ (later published as McGregor 1988) and David Zorc presented on ‘Discourse
verbs (ideophones) in Yolngu-Matha’.
1985 meeting
In some meeting in Darwin during the year, Nicholas Thieberger (SAL) presented on
‘Transitivity and grounding: a textual example’.
1986 July meeting
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Nick Reid presented a paper on ‘Phrasal verb to polysynthetic verb: Restructuring the
verb complex in Ngan’gikurunggurr’ (later published as Reid 2003).
1989 June 27-28 meeting (as reported in TELC Talk 89/1)
[sponsored by the NTU Department of Anthropology] at the Myilly Point Campus of
Northern Territory University.
Tuesday 27 June:
TELC business meeting
General discussion of the position of linguistics in Darwin academic
institutions
Bob Dixon (ANU)
Are some languages better than others?
Barbara Sayers
A communicative dilemma: Some contrasting orders of abstraction
Paul Black [Batchelor College]
Schema theory as a basis for rethinking linguistics
Neil Chadwick
The usefulness of linguistics in north Australia
Chris Kilham [SIL]
The training of Aboriginal translators
Discussion on making dictionaries
• David Nash on the National Lexicography Program of AIAS
• Robert Hooganraad on the design of dictionaries for different purposes
Discussion of computational linguistics, introduced by Jenny Lee
• Graham Costin (SIL) undertook a survey of delegates’ use of computers
Wednesday 28 June:
Mark Harvey
Warray body parts
Lys Ford
Phonology of Badjamal
Caroline Coleman
Issues in Ndjebbana vocabulary analysis
Jenny Lee
Noun categories in Tiwi
Peter Carroll
Kunwinjku stories
Kevin Ford and Dana Ober
Ergativity in Kalaw Kawaw Ya
References
2
Department of Community Development, Northern Territory 1982, 1981 index of
Northern Territory Aboriginal communities, outstations and pastoral groups
(including central reserves areas extending into W.A. and S.A.), Department of
Community Development, Darwin.
McGregor, William B. 1988. Mood and subordination in Kuniyanti. In Peter Austin
(eds.), Complex sentence constructions in Australian languages, 37-67.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Reid, Nicholas 2003, ‘Phrasal verb to synthetic verb: Recorded morphosyntactic change
in Ngan'gityemerri’, in Nicholas Evans (ed.), The Non-Pama-Nyungan Languages
of Northern Australia: Comparative studies of the continents most linguistically
complex region, pp. 95-123. Pacific Linguistics, Canberra.
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