Andrew Pawley, BA (NZ), MA, PhD (University of Auckland)
Emeritus Professor, School of Culture, History & Language
Email: Andrew.Pawley@anu.edu.au
Biographical statement
Current projects: Collaborating with Malcolm Ross and Meredith Osmond on a six volume series using lexical comparisons to reconstruct the culture and environment of Proto Oceanic speakers; completing dictionaries of Kalam (Papua New Guinea) and Wayan (Western Fiji); collaborating with Ian Saem Majnep on a book on Kalam ethnobotany.
Research interests
Austronesian and Papuan languages and cultures, the prehistory of Pacific Island peoples, folk taxonomies and ethnobiology, lexicography, phraseology and idiomaticity.
Key publications
- Samoan Phrase Structure: the Morphology-Syntax of a Western Polynesian Language. Bloomington, Indiana University Archives of Languages of the World, 1966.
- 'On the internal relationships of Eastern Oceanic languages.' In R.C. Green & M. Kelly (eds), Studies in Oceanic Culture History, vol. 3, pp. 1-142. Honolulu, Bishop Museum.
- 'Some problems in Proto-Oceanic grammar', Oceanic Linguistics 12: 103-188,1973.
- (with Frances Syder) 'Two puzzles for linguistic theory: Nativelike selection and nativelike competence.' In J.C. Richards and R.W. Schmidt eds, Language and Communication, 191-227. London: Longman, 1983.
- "Encoding events in Kalam and English: different logics for reporting experience." In R.Tomlin ed., Coherence and Grounding in Discourse. pp. 329-360. Amsterdam, Benjamins, 1987.
- 'A language which defies description by ordinary means.' In W. Foley (ed) The Role of Theory in Language Description, pp. 87-129, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 1993.
- (with Malcolm Ross and Meredith Osmond, eds) The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic. The Culture and Environment of Ancestral Oceanic Society: vol. 1, 1998, Material Culture, vol. 2, The Physical environnment, Canberra, Pacific Linguistics.
- (with Frances Syder) "The one clause at a time hypothesis." In Heidi Riggenbach (ed.) Perspectives on Fluency, pp. 163-191. Ann Arbor, U. Michigan Press, 2000.
Career highlights
Taught linguistics in the Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland from 1965-1989, with periods at UPNG (1969) and U. Hawaii (1973-78). Moved to ANU in 1990. Taught at the Linguistic Society of America's summer Institute in 1977 and 1985. Sabbaticals at Berkeley (1983), U. Frankfurt (1994), Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig (2001).
