Current research activities

Palmer:

• Possessive morphology as subject-indexing in Northwest Solomonic (Collaborators: Prof. Greville Corbett and Dr Dunstan Brown [both University of Surrey])
• Documentation and description of languages of the Bougainville region of Papua New Guinea.
• Semantically non-canonical possession.
• The typology of argument coding and word order in Oceanic.
• A cross-linguistic survey of absolute frame of spatial reference.
• Spatial reference in atoll-based languages.

Harvey:

• Complex predicates (Collaborators: Brett Baker [University of New England] and Mengistu Amberber [University of New South Wales])
• Coronal place oppositions (Collaborators: Cathi Best [University of Western Sydney], Louis Goldstein [University of Southern California] and Brett Baker [University of New England])
• Lexical change in pre-colonial Australia
• The genetic status of Garrwan
• The historical interpretation of uniformity and diversity in pre-colonial Australia
• Digital Non-Pama-Nyungan language map (Harvey)

Goddard:

• Language change, identity and cultural history of the Motu-Koita, Papua New Guinea
• Conflict and dispute, particularly the village court sytem of Papua New Guinea
• Discourses of madness in Melanesian society
• “Recovering the past” in south-east coastal Papua New Guinea

Harkins:

• Australian Aboriginal English
• Intercultural Communication

Carey:

• Missionary linguistics in Australia, especially Lancelot Threlkeld
• Scripture translation and the colonial bible