2006 Media Releases
Tuesday, 23 May 2006
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 the 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).
Her books include 'Classifiers: a Typology of Noun Categorisation Devices' (2000, paperback re-issue 2003), 'Language Contact in Amazonia' (2002), and 'A Grammar of Tariana' (2003). Her other major contributions to linguistic typology lie in a study of evidentiality as well as serial verbs, imperatives, grammars in contact, and clitics. Her book 'Evidentiality' was published by Oxford University Press in 2004.
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.
Before coming to Australia in 1994, Professor Aikhenvald worked in the Department of Languages, Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Moscow, and at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil. She was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1999.
She says qualifying for the Doctor of Letters award 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 Doctor of Letters degree awarded to linguistics scholars in Australia. The other was by the ANU in 1991 to Professor R M W (Bob) Dixon, 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'.
For further information:
Professor Aikhenvald can be contacted on Tel: 61-(0)3-9479 6402 or Email: a.aikhenvald@latrobe.edu.au