Andrew Pawley

Andrew Kenneth Pawley (born 1941), MA, PhD (Auckland), FRSNZ, FAHA, is Emeritus Professor at the School of Culture, History & Language of the College of Asia & the Pacific at the Australian National University. Pawley was born in Sydney but moved to New Zealand at the age of 12.

Career highlights

Pawley taught linguistics in the Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland from 1965-1989, with periods at the University of Papua New Guinea (1969) and the University of Hawaii (1973-78). He moved to the Australian National University in 1990. He has taught at the Linguistic Society of America's Summer Institute in 1977 and 1985. Pawley took sabbaticals at Berkeley (1983), Frankfurt (1994) and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig (2001). Currently, he is Professor Emeritus at Australian National University's College of Asia and the Pacific.

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, 1972.

• 'Some problems in Proto-Oceanic grammar', Oceanic Linguistics 12, pp. 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, pp. 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: John 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 Environment. 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: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

External links

• https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/pawley-ak?term=pawley