Dr. Marie-France Duhamel

Position: Lecturer in Linguistics

Discipline: Linguistics

Email: mariefrance.duhamel@usp.ac.fj

Office: 307, SPACE building, Laucala Campus

Biography

Marie-France Duhamel joined USP in 2023 from New Zealand. She studied at the Australian National University and the University of Auckland and has carried out fieldwork in Vanuatu (Malekula and Pentecost Islands). Marie’s research interests include language variation, language change, historical linguistics, and the documentation of the indigenous languages of the Oceanic area. Her research approach combines corpus-based quantitative analysis (i.e., statistical) and qualitative methods.

Before turning to linguistics, Marie worked 15 years as a software developer in large corporations in Aotearoa. Human languages are far more challenging and thought-provoking than machine languages and technology.

In 2021-2022, Marie contributed acoustic analyses for a public health research project in Auckland.

Education: PhD (Australian National University); MA, BA (University of Auckland, Aotearoa)

Courses Taught:

LN118 – Languages of the Pacific

LN216 – Language Use in the 21st Century Pacific

LN317 – Qualitative analysis of texts

Research Area:

Oceanic Languages, Vanuatu Languages, language variation and change.

Research Interests: Documentary and descriptive linguistics, structural linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics.

Graduate Supervision: Masters students

Publications:

Duhamel, M-F. (2022). The role of older men in a phonological change: (ɣ) in Raga, Vanuatu, Asia-Pacific Language Variation, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.21002.duh

Duhamel, M-F. (2022). Replacer la langue dans son contexte social: une étude variationniste de la langue raga, Vanuatu [Putting the language back in its social context: a variationist study of Raga language, Vanuatu], In S. Bearune, A.-L. Dotte, S. Geneix-Rabault, & F. Wacalie (Eds.), Proceedings of the Eleventh COnference on Oceanic Linguistics (COOL 11). Nouméa : Presses Universitaires de la Nouvelle-Calédonie.

Duhamel, M-F. (2021). The Concept of Taboo in Raga, Vanuatu: Semantic Mapping and Etymology. Oceania. https://doi.org/10.1002/ocea.5288

Duhamel, M-F. (2020). Borrowing from Bislama into Raga: frequency and insertion strategies, Asia-Pacific Language Variation, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.19015.duh

Duhamel, M-F. (2019). The possessive classifiers in Raga, Vanuatu: an investigation of their use and function in natural speech, Te Reo, 62(1 – Special Issue in Honour of Frantisek Lichtenberk).

Duhamel, M-F. and M. Meyerhoff (2014). An end of egalitarianism? Social evaluations of language difference in New Zealand. Linguistics Vanguard, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2014-1005