Dr Birgit Hellwig

Telephone: +61 3 9479 6404 Email : birgit.hellwig@latrobe.edu.au

Birgit Hellwig has rejoined the RCLT as an ARC Future Fellow in September 2010. She is starting a new research project on verb semantics within the Baining language family, a group of non-Austronesian languages spoken in East New Britain (Papua New Guinea). The project is built around an in-depth case study of the Baining language Qaqet: it describes and documents this language in detail, focussing on the verb system of the language and developing a methodology for investigating the meaning of verb classes from a cross-linguistic perspective. This methodology allows her to then conduct a comparative study of verb classification across the Baining languages, thus contributing data from this under-described language family to our theoretical discussions on verb classification, to our understanding of human cognition and to our knowledge of the historical relationships among this group of languages. The project combines some of Birgit's main interests: semantics and its reflexes in grammar, the relationship between language and cognition, multilingualism and language contact, and language description and documentation. She has previously explored these interests in her work on Goemai (a Chadic language of Nigeria) and Katla and Julud (Kordofanian languages of the Sudan).

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Last Updated: 9 May, 2012 1:13 PM