Felix K. Ameka | |
---|---|
Born | 1957 |
Occupation | Linguist |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Australian National University |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Leiden University |
Main interests | linguistic typology,anthropological linguistics,pragmatics |
Felix Ameka (born 1957) is a linguist working on the intersection of grammar,meaning and culture. His empirical specialisation is on West-African languages. [1] He is currently professor of Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Vitality at Leiden University [2] and teaches in the departments of Linguistics,African Languages and cultures,and African Studies. [3] In recognition of his pioneering work on cross-cultural semantics and his long-standing research ties with Australian universities,he was elected as a Corresponding Fellow to the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2019. [4]
After undergraduate training at the University of Ghana,Legon,Ameka received his PhD in 1991 from Australian National University for a dissertation on the semantic,functional,and discourse-pragmatic aspects of the grammar of Ewe. Ameka has made seminal contributions to the cross-linguistic study of interjections,editing a highly influential special issue on 'the universal yet neglected part of speech'. [5] Ameka has pioneered research on the interaction of grammar,culture,and social structure,using the framework of Natural Semantic Metalanguage to elucidate cultural scripts and interactional resources. [6] A long-term research associate at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics,Ameka has led a large-scale comparative project on the semantics of locative predicates [7] and contributed to cross-linguistic work on the expression of motion events. With Alan Dench and Nick Evans,he co-edited an influential collection on the art of grammar writing. [8]
Ameka is editor of the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics together with Azeb Amha. Since 2015,Ameka is President of the World Congress of African Linguistics. [9]
In 2021,he was elected member of the Academia Europaea. [10]
Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side,and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
In linguistics,deixis is the use of words or phrases to refer to a particular time,place,or person relative to the context of the utterance. Deixis exists in all known natural languages and is closely related to anaphora,with a sometimes unclear distinction between the two. In linguistic anthropology,deixis is seen as the same as,or a subclass of,indexicality.
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. See also the Outline of linguistics,the List of phonetics topics,the List of linguists,and the List of cognitive science topics. Articles related to linguistics include:
Robert D. Van Valin Jr. is an American linguist and the principal researcher behind the development of Role and Reference Grammar,a functional theory of grammar encompassing syntax,semantics,and discourse pragmatics. His 1997 book Syntax:structure,meaning and function is an attempt to provide a model for syntactic analysis which is just as relevant for languages like Dyirbal and Lakhota as it is for more commonly studied Indo-European languages.
An interjection is a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling or reaction. It is a diverse category,encompassing many different parts of speech,such as exclamations (ouch!,wow!),curses (damn!),greetings,response particles,hesitation markers,and other words. Due to its diverse nature,the category of interjections partly overlaps with a few other categories like profanities,discourse markers,and fillers. The use and linguistic discussion of interjections can be traced historically through the Greek and Latin Modistae over many centuries.
Ewe is a language spoken by approximately 5 million people in West Africa,mainly in Ghana and Togo. Ewe is part of a group of related languages commonly called the Gbe languages. The other major Gbe language is Fon,which is mainly spoken in Benin. Like many African languages,Ewe is tonal as well as a possible member of the Niger-Congo family.
An ideophone is any word in a certain word class evoking ideas in sound imitation (onomatopoeia) to express an action,manner,or property. The class of ideophones is the least common syntactic category cross-linguistically;it occurs mostly in African,Australian,and Amerindian languages,and sporadically elsewhere. It is globally the only known word class exotic to English. Ideophones resemble interjections but are unclassifiable as such owing to their special phonetic or derivational characteristics,and based on their syntactic function within the sentence. They may include sounds that deviate from the language's phonological system,imitating—often in a repetitive manner—sounds of movement,animal noises,bodily sounds,noises made by tools or machines,and the like.
Stephen C. Levinson FBA is a British social scientist,known for his studies of the relations between culture,language and cognition,and former scientific director of the Language and Cognition department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen,the Netherlands.
Bilua is the most populous Papuan language spoken in the Solomon Islands. It is a Central Solomon language spoken by about 9,000 people on the island of Vella Lavella. It is one of the four Papuan non-Austronesian languages spoken in the Solomon Islands.
Eloise Jelinek was an American linguist specializing in the study of syntax. Her 1981 doctoral dissertation at the University of Arizona was titled "On Defining Categories:AUX and PREDICATE in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic". She was a member of the faculty of the University of Arizona from 1981 to 1992.
Tony Naden is a British lexicographer who specializes on Western Oti-Volta subgroup of Gur languages. He has compiled dictionaries in the following languages:Dagbanli,Mampelle,Mõõré,Nabt,Talene,KaMara and Yarsi.
Alan Stewart Duthie was a Scottish linguist and academic who settled and worked in Ghana all his adult life. He was a pioneer in linguistics at the University of Ghana,Legon,for 49 years.
Azeb Amha (1967) is a linguist working on the morphology and syntax of Afroasiatic languages,with a special focus on Omotic languages. A senior researcher at the African Studies Center Leiden,Azeb is co-editor of the international Journal of African Languages and Linguistics and member of the board of the Dutch Society for African Studies (NVAS).
English interjections are a category of English words –such as yeah,ouch,Jesus,oh,mercy,yuck,etc. –whose defining features are the infrequency with which they combine with other words to form phrases,their loose connection to other elements in clauses,and their tendency to express emotive meaning. These features separate English interjections from the language's other lexical categories,such as nouns and verbs. Though English interjections,like interjections in general,are often overlooked in descriptions of the language,English grammars do offer minimal descriptions of the category.
Noel Burton-Roberts is a British linguist and Emeritus Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. He is known for work ranging over general and English linguistics:architecture of language,semantics,pragmatics,philosophy of language,and English grammar.
Mira Ariel is a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University,specializing in pragmatics. A pioneer of the study of information structure,she is best known for creating and developing Accessibility Theory.
Birgit Hellwig is a German linguist specializing in African and Papuan languages. She is professor of general linguistics at the University of Cologne.
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