Felix Ameka (born 1957) is a linguist working on the intersection of grammar, meaning and culture. His empirical specialisation is on West-African languages. He is currently professor of Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Vitality at
Leiden University
Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; ) is a Public university, public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. Established in 1575 by William the Silent, William, Prince of Orange as a Protestantism, Protestant institution, it holds the d ...
and teaches in the departments of Linguistics, African Languages and cultures, and African Studies. 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.
After undergraduate training at the
University of Ghana, Legon, Ameka received his PhD in 1991 from
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 ...
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
An interjection is a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling, situation or reaction. It is a diverse category, with many different types, such as exclamations ''(ouch!'', ''wow!''), curses (''da ...
, editing a highly influential special issue on 'the universal yet neglected part of speech'. 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. 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 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.
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.
In 2021, he was elected member of the
Academia Europaea
The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of humanities, letters, law, and sciences.
The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europe ...
.
Key publications
* Ameka, Felix K. 1991. ''Ewe. Its Grammatical Constructions and Illucutionary Devices.'' PhD dissertation, Australian National University.
* Ameka, Felix K. 1992. 'Interjections. The Universal Yet Neglected Part of Speech.' ''Journal of Pragmatics'' 18 (2–3): 101–18.
* Ameka, Felix K., Alan Dench, and Nicholas Evans, eds. 2006. ''Catching Language. The Standing Challenge of Grammar Writing''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
* Ameka, Felix K., and Stephen C. Levinson. 2007. 'Introduction: The Typology and Semantics of Locative Predicates: Posturals, Positionals, and Other Beasts.' ''Linguistics'' 45 (5part6): 847–871.
* Ameka, Felix K., and Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu, eds. 2008. ''Aspect and Modality in Kwa Languages''. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
References
External links
Living people
Linguists from Ghana
Australian National University alumni
Academic staff of Leiden University
Members of Academia Europaea
1957 births
21st-century linguists
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