RMW Dixon

RMW Dixon ( Robert Malcolm Ward "Bob" Dixon; born January 25, 1939 in Gloucester , England ) is a British - Australian linguist who has been Professor of Linguistics at the Cairns Institute of James Cook University in Queensland (Australia) since 2008 .

Dixon has mainly worked in the field of Australian and South American languages , but has also dealt with general language- typological issues, e.g. B. the phenomenon of ergativity and the investigation of the processes involved in speech contact .

His grammar of Dyirbal is particularly well known because it is a good example of the successful avoidance of an unreflective application of categories that were developed to describe European languages ​​to languages ​​that function in a completely different way.

Publications (selection)

• The Dyirbal language of North Queensland. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1972
• A grammar of Yidiny. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1977
• A grammar of Boumaa Fijian. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1988
• Ergativity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1994
• The rise and fall of languages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1997
• Australian languages: their nature and development. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002
• The Jarawara language of southern Amazonia. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004
• Basic linguistic theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010
  • Volume 1: Methodology. 2010
  • Volume 2: Grammatical topics. 2010
  • Volume 3, Further grammatical topics. 2012
• I am a linguist. Brill, Leiden 2011 (autobiography)

Together with Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald , he was editor of the field research-based language typology work The Amazonian languages at Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999, ISBN 0-521-57021-2 .

Web links

• Prof. Robert Dixon on the James Cook University website

Individual evidence

1. ^ Daniel W. Hieber: On linguistics, linguists, and our times: A linguist's personal narrative reviewed . In: Linguistic Typology. Volume 17, 2013, Issue 2, pp. 291–321