Current Research Projects

Research in the Department focuses on the indigenous languages of the Indo-Pacific, particularly Southeast Asia, New Guinea, Australia and the Southwest Pacific. Current major projects are listed below, but we are interested in supervising dissertations on any linguistic topic pertaining to this region.

• the Grammar and Social Cognition project, which examines the way diverse grammars crystallise human reasoning about social reality
• the Oceanic Lexicon Project, which aims at producing a six volume set of essays on the lexicon of Proto Oceanic, the language ancestral to nearly 500 Austronesian languages of the Pacific.
• the East Nusantara Project (Rongga and Waima’a), plus Helong is concerned with documenting and describing little-known languages of East Timor and eastern Indonesia as well as with their typology and genetic relationships.
• the Kalam Ethnobiology Project investigates the perception and use of the natural environment by the Kalam people of Papua New Guinea, in collaboration with indigenous experts and biologists.
• the Mon-Khmer Languages Project focuses on language documentation and comparative-historical studies of mainland Southeast Asian languages.
• the Western Arnhem Land Song Languages project, which documents the interaction of language in song in a number of languages in northern Australia
• the Indonesian Parallel Grammar (ParGram) project, which build resources by carrying out research on Indonesian to create a cutting edge empirically robust computational grammar, corpus and lexicon
• the Papuan Linguistics Project, aimed at extending the descriptive record of non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea and investigating their historical relationships and development.