Bulletin

Issue: June 2006

News

Rare award for leading linguist

La Trobe University has awarded its highest degree, Doctor of Letters (D Litt), to one of the world's leading linguists, Professor Alexandra Aikhenvald.

Professor Aikhenvald is Professor of Linguistics and Associate Director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University.

Higher doctorates, based on substantial work (usually published books and papers) require a panel of international examiners and are rarely awarded. Her award was based on four books and 14 papers submitted in February this year.

Professor Aikhenvald's work includes descriptive and historical aspects of Berber languages and in 1990 she published, in Russian, a grammar of Modern Hebrew.

Much of her research since has involved travelling to, and spending extended periods living in, some of remotest regions of the Amazon Basin in South America.

Professor Aikhenvald is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family of northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995, based on work with the last speaker who has since died), Warekena (1998), and Tariana, from northwest Amazonia (2003).

She is now in the final stages of a comprehensive grammar of the Manambu language from the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Once again, her research for this involves considerable field work in isolated villages.

Qualifying for the Doctor of Letters award, she says, was not only a great personal achievement, but recognition of linguistics as a major research strength at La Trobe University.

Professor Aikhenvald says hers is only the second Doctors of Letters awarded to linguistics scholars in Australia. The other was by the ANU in 1991 to Professor Bob Dixon, who is now Director of La Trobe's Research Centre for Linguistic Typology.

Previous higher doctorates awarded by La Trobe University include multi award-winning Australian author, historian and La Trobe Emeritus Scholar, Dr Inga Clendinnen, and internationally renowned classicist and Resident Fellow at the University, the late Professor A D Trendall.

La Trobe University last year was rated the 23rd best university in the world in the arts and humanities in a survey by the British 'Times Higher Education Supplement'.