Linguistics

The Carmichael Watson collection in Edinburgh University Library, centred on the papers of the pioneering folklorist Alexander Carmichael (1832-1912), is the foremost collection of its kind in the country, and is crucial to understanding the customs, storytelling traditions, poetry, songs and general lore of the Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland. The project will see an intense dissemination and research programme alongside development of a digital resource that will enable users to search fully-indexed catalogue descriptions, full text transcriptions and biographical records.

A fundamental communicative task for all languages is to show which participant in a sentence is the subject. Languages have various ways of identifying the subject, including word-order, agreement, and case-marking. However, there is another unique and strange method, almost entirely unknown until now, found only in Northwest-Solomonic (NWS), a group of Oceanic languages of the Solomon Islands and Bougainville. In some constructions, these languages indicate subject using word-forms normally indicating possessors of nouns.

The World Oral Literature Project is an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record.

Established at the University of Cambridge in 2009, the project aspires to become a permanent centre for the appreciation and preservation of oral literature and collaborate with local communities to document their own oral narratives. The World Oral Literature Project will also publish a library of oral texts and occasional papers, and make the collections accessible through new media platforms.

Phase 1 of the Anglo-Norman On-Line Hub project (2002-2004), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board under its Resource Enhancement Scheme, had the following aims and objectives:

to open up for on-line access significant resources that will advance research into the languages and society of medieval Britain and support university courses across a wide areas of medieval studies;

to develop, evaluate, deploy and propagate XML-based technologies that will be of service in many areas of Humanities computing worlwide.