Language and CuLture researCh Centre College of Arts, Society and Education — James Cook University PO Box 6811, Cairns, North Queensland, 4870, Australia Director: Distinguished Professor A.Y.Aikhenvald; Deputy-Director: Professor R.M.W. Dixon
[email protected] [email protected] Bulletin — February 2018 The Language and Culture Research Centre (LCRC) is nested within the College of Arts, Society and Education (Dean, Professor Nola Alloway) and works in association with the Cairns Institute (Director, Distinguished Professor Stewart Lockie) at James Cook University. Overview Now into its tenth year, the Language and Culture Research Centre further strengthened its reputation as a leading international centre for insightful research into the basic nature of human language. Every member of the Centre is concerned with the analysis of previously undescribed (or scarcely described) languages from across tropical regions — the Americas, Africa, Asia, New Guinea, the Pacific, and northern Australia. Hand-in-hand with theoretically- informed descriptive investigations, we stand at the forefront of work on inductively based grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic generalisations concerning the ways in which languages work. Distinguished Professor Aikhenvald was awarded a competitive grant 'Language emergence in multilingual contexts' jointly with Professor Péter Maitz (University of Augsburg) under the Universities Australia-Germany Joint Research Co-operation Scheme. This is in addition to a number of continuing projects — Aikhenvald's Australian Laureate Fellowship 'How gender shapes the world', plus an ARC Discovery Project 'The integration of language and society' and an ARC Linkage 'Land, language, and heritage'. During the year, three new Post-Doctoral Research Fellows were recruited, working on languages from South America and New Guinea.