Prof. William Foley

		A B (Brown University) M A, PhD (University of California, Berkeley) Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
		Phone	9351 4569
		FAX	9351 7572
		Location	Rm 217 Transient Building map
			Email

Masters of Cross-Cultural Communications advisor

I have quite a wide range of interests. I have worked in syntactic theory from a lexicalist approach and the role of semantics in syntax and have published extensively on this topic (Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar, Cambridge, 1984). I am particularly interested in the usefulness of modern syntactic theories in the insightful description of the Austronesian and Papuan languages of the Pacific, which is my main area of specialization. This focus is evident in publications like The Papuan Languages of New Guinea (Cambridge, 1986) and The Yimas Language of New Guinea (Stanford, 1991). Over the last 20 years I have conducted extensive periods of fieldwork in Pacific area languages, specifically in the Papuan languages of the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, such as Yimas, Watam and Mambuwan, as well as some Austronesian languages like Palauan, Fijian and Tagalog. This fieldwork is the discipline which guides my continuing development of syntactic theories, so that for me theory and description constantly reinforce each other synergistically.

My other main area of interest, again one forged ultimately out of my interest in fieldwork, is anthropological linguistics, reflected in my most recent major publication, Anthropological Linguistics: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1997). I am strongly committed to the view of linguistics as ultimately a branch of anthropology and believe that language can only really be adequately understood when it is conceived as both a psychological and a social skill. Within the very wide field of anthropological linguistics, I am specifically concerned with the Boasian/Humboldtian question of the relationship between language and thought and recent empirical approaches to investigate this and also ethnopoetics, the specific linguist practices cultures use to create various verbal genres like narratives, proverbs, songs, poetry, etc and the aesthetic value and social role speakers ascribe to these.

• ARC Grant 2002-04 $110,000 Papuan Descriptive Linguistics of the West Sepik Region, sole CI
• French Govt Research Grant with Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, 2002-2003 EUR 20,000, joint CI
• German Gov't Research Grant, with Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2004-05, ~EUR 20,000, joint CI

• syntactic theory from a lexicalist approach
• the role of semantics in syntax
• the usefulness of modern syntactic theories in the insightful description of the Austronesian and Papuan languages of the Pacific
• fieldwork in Pacific area languages, specifically in the Papuan languages of the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, such as Yimas, Watam and Mambuwan, as well as some Austronesian languages like Palauan, Fijian and Tagalog.
• anthropological linguistics
• the Boasian/Humboldtian question of the relationship between language and thought and recent empirical approaches to investigate this
• ethnopoetics, the specific linguist practices cultures use to create various verbal genres like narratives, proverbs, songs, poetry, etc and the aesthetic value and social role speakers ascribe to these.

• 1984. Reprinted 1985. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar (with R.D. Van Valin). 416 pp. Cambridge University Press.
• 1985. Information packaging in the clause (with R.D. Van Valin). In T. Shopen, eds., Language Typology and Syntactic Description, 282-364. Cambridge University Press.
• 1985. Clausehood and verb serialization (with M. Olson). In J. Nichols and A. Woodbury, eds., Grammar Inside and Outside the Clause, 17-60. Cambridge University Press.
• 1986. The Papuan Languages of New Guinea. Cambridge University Press. 305pp.
• 1988. Language birth: the sociolinguistics of pidginization and creolization. In F. Newmeyer and R. Ubell, eds., Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, 162-83. Cambridge University Press.
• 1991. The Yimas Language of New Guinea. Stanford University Press. 490p.
• 1991. New Guinea languages. Oxford Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, volume 3, 86-91. Oxford University Press.
• 1993. ed. The Role of Theory in Language Description. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 455pp.
• 1994. Information Structure. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, volume 3: 1678-1685. Pergamon Press.
• 1997. Anthropological Linguistics: an introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 500pp.
• [Journal Articles] 2000. The languages of New Guinea. Annual Review of Anthropology 29.357-404.
• [Conference paper] 2003. Register, genre and language documentation in literate and preliterate communities. In Austin, P., ed, Papers in Language Documentation and Description, volume 1, 84-97. London: School of Oriental and African Languages.
• [Conference paper] 2004. Language endangerment, language documentation and capacity building: challenges from New Guinea. In P. Austin, ed, Papers in Language Documentation and Description, volume 2. London: School of Oriental and African Languages.
• [Encyclopedia Article] 2003. New Guinea area languages. In W. J. Frawley, ed, International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2nd ed). New York: Oxford University Press.

• LNGS1002 Language and Social Context
• LNGS2602 Syntax
• LNGS3699 Linguistics Research Issues
• SSCP6901 Critical Perspectives on Development B