Andrew Kenneth Pawley (born 1941 in

Sydney Sydney is the capital city of the States and territories of Australia, state of New South Wales and the List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city in Australia. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Syd ...

) is an Australian–New Zealand linguist and Emeritus Professor at the School of Culture, History and Language of the College of Asia and the Pacific at the

Australian National University The Australian National University (ANU) is a public university, public research university and member of the Group of Eight (Australian universities), Group of Eight, located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton, A ...

Career

Pawley was born in

but moved to

New Zealand New Zealand () is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and List of islands of New Zealand, over 600 smaller islands. It is the List of isla ...

at the age of 12. He was educated at the University of Auckland, gaining a PhD in anthropology in 1966. His doctoral thesis, ''The structure of Karam: a grammar of a New Guinea Highlands language'', was dedicated to Kalam, a Papuan ( Trans–New Guinea) language of

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...

. He taught linguistics in the Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland from 1965 to 1989, with periods at the University of Papua New Guinea (1969) and the

University of Hawaii A university () is an educational institution, institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several Discipline (academia), academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly ...

(1973 to 1978). He moved to the

in 1990. He has taught at the Linguistic Society of America's Summer Institute in 1977 and 1985. Pawley took sabbaticals at Berkeley (1983), Frankfurt (1994) and

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (, shortened to MPI EVA) is a research institute based in Leipzig, Germany, that was founded in 1997. It is part of the Max Planck Society network. Well-known scientists currently based at ...

Leipzig Leipzig (, ; ; Upper Saxon: ; ) is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Saxony. The city has a population of 628,718 inhabitants as of 2023. It is the List of cities in Germany by population, eighth-largest city in Ge ...

(2001). Currently, he is Professor Emeritus at

's College of Asia and the Pacific.

Research

Pawley's research interests include Austronesian and Papuan languages and cultures, the prehistory of Pacific Island peoples, folk taxonomies and ethnobiology,

lexicography Lexicography is the study of lexicons and the art of compiling dictionaries. It is divided into two separate academic disciplines: * Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries. * Theoretical le ...

phraseology In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units (often collectively referred to as ''phrasemes''), in which the component parts of the expression tak ...

, and idiomaticity. Andrew Pawley has completed dictionaries of Wayan (an Oceanic language of Western

Fiji Fiji, officially the Republic of Fiji, is an island country in Melanesia, part of Oceania in the South Pacific Ocean. It lies about north-northeast of New Zealand. Fiji consists of an archipelago of more than 330 islands—of which about ...

); and of Kalam (a Papuan language of

), in collaboration with Ian Saem Majnep. Since the mid-1990s, he has been collaborating with Malcolm Ross and Meredith Osmond on the ''Oceanic Lexicon Project'', an encyclopedic series using lexical comparisons to reconstruct the culture and environment of

Proto-Oceanic Proto-Oceanic (abbreviated as POc) is a proto-language that comparative linguistics, historical linguists since Otto Dempwolff have reconstructed as the hypothetical common ancestor of the Oceanic languages, Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian ...

speakers. Five volumes have been published, in 1998, 2003, 2008, 2016.

Key publications

Between 1960 and 2010, Andrew Pawley published 196 academic publications:See chapter “Andrew Pawley's writings”, in Bowden et al. (2010), pp.21–35. * 21 publications on Polynesian languages and culture history, * 14 on Fijian and Rotuman languages, * 53 on Austronesian, especially Oceanic, languages and their culture history, * 29 on

Papuan languages The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands in Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and East Timor. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply ...

, including 19 on Kalam. * 44 on varieties of English,

discourse Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. F ...

and

pragmatics In linguistics and the philosophy of language, pragmatics is the study of how Context (linguistics), context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship ...

, * 35 on miscellaneous topics. Among these, the most important ones include: * Pawley, Andrew. 1966
''Samoan Phrase Structure: the Morphology-Syntax of a Western Polynesian Language''
Bloomington: Indiana University Archives of Languages of the World, 1966. *Pawley, Andrew (with Malcolm Ross and Meredith Osmond, eds.) '' The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society'' (5 volumes). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. *Pawley, Andrew (with Ralph Bulmer, with the assistance of John Kias, Simon Peter Gi and Ian Saem Majnep). 2011
''A dictionary of Kalam with ethnographic notes''
Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Notes and references

Notes

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Pawley, Andrew Kenneth 1941 births Living people Linguists of Austronesian languages Linguists from Australia Linguists of Papuan languages Ethnobiologists Academic staff of the University of Papua New Guinea Historical linguists Fellows of the Australian Academy of the Humanities University of Auckland alumni