Rik De Busser completed his PhD dissertation “Towards a Grammar of Takivatan Bunun” in 2010. He is currently holding an RCLT Post-Doctoral Fellowship.

For the past five years, Rik has been doing research on the Takivatan dialect of Bunun, an Austronesian language spoken on Taiwan. He is currently preparing a fieldwork on a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Yunnan, China. His current interests include the Austronesian languages of Taiwan, methodologies for designing falsifiable experimental setups for descriptive linguistics, issues related to valency and argument alignment, the rationalization of descriptive linguistic methodologies and language documentations, and non-deictic semantic extensions of demonstratives.

From 2000 till 2003, Rik worked as a computational linguist at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law & IT of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Many of his publications and talks are for download on his personal website: www.rdbusser.com.

 

Ma-yuan, my Takivatan fieldwork site.