Academic Gets Travel Award at 2014 African Linguistics Conference

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Linguistics Lecturer in the School of Arts, Professor Heike Tappe, won an award of US$650 at the 45^th Annual Conference of African Linguistics (ACAL45) at the University of Kansas in the United States in reward for the results of her research which she presented at the Conference.

Tappe’s abstract was deemed to be among the top-rated abstracts the conference received this year.

‘I feel appreciated and am extremely happy to have received this competitive, merit-based travel award. It is reassuring that my research on Southern African Story Grammar is valued in this way,’ she said.

The theme of this year’s ACAL Conference was “Africa’s Endangered Languages: Documentary and Theoretical Approaches”.  The Conference ran in five parallel sessions over three days bringing together linguists from all over the world who are working on African languages and African Linguistics.

The topics varied from the sociolinguistic such as Decolonising Linguistic Imperialism in Africa through Documentation and Preservation, to theoretical topics concerning formal features of African languages such as The Linker in Khoisan Languages.

Tappe was at the Conference as her paper titled “What About (Southern) African Story Grammar?” had been accepted for an oral presentation.

Wanting to present her research to an international forum with a strong representation of a multitude of African countries, Tappe’s empirical material covered data from Malawi and South Africa.  She plans a further data collection in Lesotho. ‘I wanted to make sure that my colleagues felt that my research was valuable,’ said Tappe.

‘There were a number of talks on emerging African youth languages which were very relevant to my own research on code-switching between isiZulu and English. There were also several talks on contemporary models of linguistic fieldwork and the challenges of documenting Africa’s least known languages both of which are highly relevant to my postgraduate supervision.

‘I had the chance to talk to and network with colleagues from Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Cameroon as well as from a variety of American universities. These interactions have led to new research collaborations and I also managed to attract a new PhD student, who will start working with me from the second semester this year.’

-          Melissa Mungroo