Alexandra Aikhenvald

My general areas of expertise include (a) language documentation, linguistic typology and universals of languages, (b) historical and comparative linguistics, with special focus on language contact and areal linguistics, (c) multilingualism and sociolinguistics, (d) endangered languages and typology of language obsolescence, and (e) interactions of language and culture, and linguistic anthropology. I am a major expert in gender (including linguistic and social gender) and noun categorization devices of various kinds, especially classifiers - numeral, possessive, verbal, and other types. My further major area of expertise covers evidentiality (grammatical expression of informaiton source) and the expression of informaiton source in general across the languages of the world, in addition to related categories, including mirativity and expectation of knowledge, access and attitude to knwoledge (covering modalities of various types). I am a major expert in commands and directives, especially imperatives and prohibities as their negative counterpart, and their interaction with societal structures and hierarchies. My further expertise lies in the investigation of possession and ownership across the world, with special focus on correlations between these and societal hierarchies and relationships. Further areas include serial verb constructions as a means of packaging information, verb compounding, the structures of phonological and grammatical word, clitics, comparative constructions, clause chaining, number systems, valency-changing derivations, deictic categories, and the typology of word formation and derivational processes, discourse and grammar, and lexicography and semantics in general. My expertise in each individual grammatical issue covers its realization, semantics, cognitive motivations, and historical development, including contact-induced change, addressing diversities and communalities in languages across the world, and offering cultural, cognitive, historical and areal explanations. My further areas of expertise lie in grammar writing and its methodology, fieldwork techniques and methodological issues, and compiling dictionaries. I am an expert in linguistic aspects and issues of health communication with particular focus on outbreaks (including COVID-19) and its impact on language.
My specific fields of expertise cover Amazonian and South American languages in general, with special focus on Arawak languages (the largest family in South America), especially those from northwest Amazonia. I am also expert in Papuan languages of New Guinea, especially those of the Sepik region and the Ndu family (including Manambu, Yalaku, and Iatmul), with additional expertise on Oceanic and other Austronesian languages. My expertise in the Amazonian and Papuan domains involves grammatical analysis and dictionary creation, historical and comparative analysis and investigation of contact-induced change for each group, based on intensive fieldwork and archival work. For each of these, my expertise includes in-depth familiarity with the relevant social and cultural practices and ethnographic issues, the history of studies for each of the groups, and their cultural contexts with other groups. I am closely familiar with a number of Indo-European, Semitic, and Finno-Ugric languages. My further areas of expertise lie in comparative Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages and cultures, and specific issues in the languages I know, including Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Estonian, Yiddish, and Hebrew across its history.
Based on my extensive fieldwork experience on several continents, my special expertise lies is in closely working with small communities in Amazonia and PNG and expatriate and immigrant communities, producing materials including story books, primers, and teaching-oriented grammars and thesauruses, managing large corpora of data (also in web-based form), and in social and cultural anthropology and gender studies.
I have a high profile in the field of linguistcis (h-index 52), and am, inter alia, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (since 1999), of the Queensland Society of Arts and Sciences (since 2015) and Academia Europaea (since 2021).