LSA 2009

Nick Evans is head of the Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. He worked on a wide variety Australian Aboriginal languages as linguist, anthropologist and interpreter, and has recent extended his fieldwork into Papuan linguistics (Transfly region). He has written widely on Aboriginal languages and across a broad spectrum of general linguistics topics, including grammars of Kayardild (1995) and Bininj Gun-wok (2003), dictionaries of Kayardild (1992) and Dalabon (2004, with Francesca Merlan and Maggie Tukumba), as well as editing books on linguistics and archaeology (with Pat McConvell), on polysynthesis (with Hans-Jürgen Sasse), on the classification of north Australian languages, and on grammar-writing (Catching Language: the standing challenge of grammar writing, with Felix Ameka and Alan Dench). Dying Words: endangered languages and what they have to tell us will be appearing with Wiley Blackwells in early 2009. More generally, his research interests include grammatical, phonological and semantic typology, the semantics/pragmatics interface, historical linguistics, contact and areal linguistics, problems of documenting endangered languages, linguistics in musicology, and the interactions of language, culture and thought.