(Please visit my personal website for more information about current projects, downloadable papers and more.)

My research interests lie in three intersecting domains: semantic and structural typology; the relationship between language, culture and cognition; and the documentation and analysis of the original languages of Australia. It explores questions like:

1) What is common to all human languages (and why)?

2) How much (and why) do languages differ from one another?

3) To what extent do the differences and similarities between languages reflect and/or shape how we think about the world?

Much of my research builds upon collaborations with speakers of Paman languages (e.g. Kuuk Thaayorre) spoken in and around the community of Pormpuraaw (Cape York Peninsula, Australia). The knowledge they have shared has impressed on me how linguistic analysis can be enriched by recognising that grammatical structures are part of a larger communicative system, encompassing multiple languages, registers and modalities. 

Current research interests include:

• the role of cultural and physical environment in shaping spatial language and thought (with Bill Palmer, Joe Blythe, Maia Ponsonnet, Tom Ennever, Dorothea Hoffmann, Eleanor Yacopetti, Laurits Stapput-Knudsen, Jonathon Lum and Jonathan Schlossberg);
• cultural, gestural and conceptual representations of geo-centric directions (north, south, east, west) and viewpoint-bound directions (left/right) in the absence of such directional language (with Joe Blythe, Hywel Stoakes, Juergen Bohnemeyer, Jonathon Lum, Jill Vaughan, Anna Margetts);
• the cross-cultural representation of time in terms of space in both language and thought (with Lera Boroditsky, Gede Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg, Poppy Siahaan);
• representing knowledge, beliefs, pain and emotions in Australian Aboriginal languages (with Jill Vaughan and Deborah Tan);
• the ethics of collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous linguists and language workers in Australia (with Lesley Woods, Tonya Stebbins, Vicki Couzens, Harley Dunolly-Lee, Tula Wynyard, Gari Tudor-Smith, Margaret Carew).