I am a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. My primary research interest lies in syntax and historical linguistics, in particular:
(i) How does the syntactic typology of Austronesian languages
inform the variation vs. uniformity in language design?;
(ii) How does the synchronic variation among genetically related
languages inform patterns of language change?;
(iii) How does Austronesian comparative linguistics contribute to
our understanding of the peopling of Southeast Asia and the
Pacific?
To answer these questions, my research focuses on the morphosyntactic typology of Austronesian languages, in particular languages with the so-called "Austronesian-type alignment". Starting from 2024, a joint project with Mary Walworth and Miriam Meyerhoff will tackle (ii)-(iii) via a systematic comparison of western Austronesian with east Polynesian languages under a Marsden standard grant.
A secondary focus of my research is linguistic subgrouping. Since 2020, my collaborators and I have been using multidisciplinary data to re-examine the patterns of the Austronesian diaspora under a Marsden Fast Start Grant. Some outputs of our project can be found here, here and here.
I am currently the Editor-in-Chief of Te Reo—the Journal of the New Zealand Linguistic Society. Info about the journal can be found here.
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my Hudson lecture at RSNZ Wellington Branch. [link]
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My PhD advisee Hero Patrianto will be giving a keynote at AFLA 31! [link]
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ICAL 16 panel: Geographical typology as a window into the evolution of the Austronesian family [link], with Bradley McDonnell, Daniel Kaufman, Shelece Easterday, Christina Truong, Isaac Stead, Blaine Billings, and Clemens Mayer
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Proceedings of AFLA 30: The Javanese free exceptive and its implications for ellipsis constraints in Austronesian [link]. With Luané Lennox and Eric Potsdam.