Professor Nick Evans
Contact details
Phone +61 3 8344 8988
Email: nrde@ unimelb.edu.au
Office: Arts Centre, 526
Biography
Nick Evans teaches in the Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. In terms of language area, his mail specialisation is in the study of Australian Aboriginal languages: he has published detailed grammars of two (Kayardild, and Bininj Gun-wok) and dictionaries of Kayardild and Dalabon, as well as over sixty other publications on aspects of Australia's indigenous languages. His experiences working on these languages have fuelled a broader interest in the problems little-known language raise for general linguistic theory, and in issues of descriptive and documentary praxis. His teaching and research interests include grammatical and semantic typology, intonation, historical linguistics, contact and areal linguistics, the effects of culture on the emergence of language structure, the pragmatics/semantics interface, and the use of linguistic evidence in native title claims. Current projects include a cross-linguistic study of reciprocals, and an interdisciplinary project documenting Iwaidja and other languages of the Cobourg Peninsula, Australia in their full cultural context.
Publications
Books
Evans, Nicholas. 2003 Bininj Gun-wok: a pan-dialectal grammar of Mayali, Kunwinjku and Kune. (2 volumes). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. [Link to catalogue entry]
Evans, Nicholas (ed.). 2003. The non-Pama-Nyungan languages of northern Australia: comparative studies of the continent's most linguistically complex region. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Pp. x + 513.
Evans, Nicholas and Hans-Jürgen Sasse (ed.). 2002 Problems of Polysynthesis. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Studia Typologica, Neue Reihe.
McConvell, Patrick and Nicholas Evans. (eds.) 1997. Archaeology and Linguistics: Global Perspectives on Ancient Australia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press
Evans Nicholas. 1995. A Grammar of Kayardild.
Articles and Book chapters
Evans, Nicholas. 2000a. Kinship verbs. In Petra M. Vogel and Bernard Comrie, eds. Approaches to the Typology of Word Classes. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. 103-
Evans, Nicholas. 2000b. Iwaidjan, a very un-Australian language family. Linguistic Typology 4.2:91-142.
Evans, Nicholas. 2000c. Word classes in the world's languages. In Geert Booij, Christian Lehmann and Joachim Mugdan, eds., Morphology: a Handbook on Inflection and Word Formation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. 708-732.
Evans, Nicholas. 2001. The last speaker is dead - long live the last speaker! In Paul Newman and Martha Ratliff, eds. Linguistic Field Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 250-281.
Evans, Nicholas. 2002 . Country and the word. Linguistic Evidence in the Croker Sea Claim. In John Henderson and David Nash (eds.), Language in Native Title. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Pp. 51-98.
Evans, Nicholas, 2002. The true status of grammatical object affixes: evidence from Bininj Gun-wok. In Evans, Nicholas and Hans-Jürgen Sasse, eds., Problems of polysynthesis. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Pp. 15-50.
Evans, Nicholas. 2003. Culture and structuration in the languages
of Australia. Annual
Review of Anthropology 32:13-40.
Evans, Nicholas, Dunstan Brown and Greville Corbett. 2001. Dalabon pronominal prefixes and the typology of syncretism: a Network Morphology analysis. Yearbook of Morphology 2000, 187-231.
Evans, Nicholas, Dunstan Brown and Greville Corbett. 2002. The semantics of gender in Mayali: partially parallel systems and formal implementation. Language 78.1:109-153.
Evans, Nicholas and David Wilkins. 2000. In the mind's ear: the semantic extensions of perception verbs in Australian languages. Language 76.3: 546-592.