Postgraduate Profile

John Olstad

PhD Candidate, School of Humanities & Social Science

Discipline: Linguistics
Faculty/Division: Education and Arts
Email: john.olstad@uon.edu.au
Campus: Callaghan, Newcastle

Current Research

PhD Thesis Title: Topics in a Grammar of Nehan

Supervisors:  Dr. Bill Palmer (Principal) & Dr. Catriona Malau

Abstract
Nehan is an Oceanic language; North-West Solomonic group.  It is spoken on the Green Islands (Nissan Is. and Pinipel Is.) of Papua New Guinea located between New Ireland and Bougainville and has approximately 6,500 speakers.

My project is descriptive and documentary, but will also attempt to go in depth on a small number of select topics in a grammar of Nehan.  I will be interested to describe the processes involved in nominal classification (i.e. what determines class membership and how is that information stored and accessed) as well as investigating spatial language and cognition in Nehan.  Since Nehan is spoken on an atoll, this will be a particularly interesting environment to study the effects of environment on spatial conceptualization.

Qualificatations

  • 2010 PhD Candidate (Linguistics), University of Newcastle, Australia
  • 2008 MA in Linguistics, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA.
  • 2006 BA in Linguistics, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA.

Languages Spoken

English, Japanese, Tok Pisin (absolute beginner)

Professional Background

  • 2007-2010 Research Assistant "Markedness and Learnability in Second Language Phonology" funded by US National Institute of Health.
  • 2006-2007 Teaching Assistant, Linguistics, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Research interests

Cognitive and anthropological linguistics, noun classification, spatial language and cognition, morphological regularity and irregularity, probabilistic approaches to language, linguistic typology.

Publications

(In Press) Noun class assignment in Swahili via Bayesian statistics. Conference paper. Proceedings of the 40th Pozna? Linguistic Meeting, Gniezno, Poland. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Presentations

2010. "Spatial concepts and the physical environment: comparing Ryukyuan and Tokyo Japanese",
Space and Time Across Languages, Disciplines And Cultures (STALDAC) 2010, Cambridge, England

2009. "(Automatic) Noun Classification in Swahili", 40th Pozna? Linguistic Meeting, Gniezno, Poland

2009. "Encoding Spatial Relations in Ryukyuan Japanese", Workshop on Ryukyuan Languages and
Linguistic Research, University of California-Los Angeles.

2008. "Fricative Systems of Korean-English Bilingual Children", University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
College of Health Sciences Research Colloquium, Milwaukee, WI, USA