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I'm a linguist who does fieldwork with endangered languages in west New Guinea. Most of my work focusses on the languages spoken in the beautiful Raja Ampat archipelago, just off the northwest tip of New Guinea. I use data from these languages to investigate theoretical, typological, and historical questions about the phonetics and phonology of word prosody, the morphosyntactic expression of possession and spatial deixis, and language contact, diversification, and change more generally. I currently hold a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh.
I work in partnership with the wonderful Center for Endangered Languages Documentation in Manokwari. If you're thinking of doing research in Indonesian Papua, I strongly suggest you get in touch with them :)
Silakan klik di sini untuk bahasa Indonesia
14 December 2023: All of the Raja Ampat data collected during my British Academy Fellowship is now archived and freely available on Edinburgh DataShare! You can access the data here: datashare.ed.ac.uk/handle/10283/8573
1 December 2023: I've a new paper out in Oceanic Linguistics, in which I reconstruct Split Inalienable Coding in the East Bird's Head family.
23 September 2023: Two months in the field; eight events; ten presentations. It's been a very busy summer! You can check out some of the things I've been talking about over the last few months—including the synchrony and diachrony of uncommon word-prosodic changes in the languages of Raja Ampat, a little-known phenomenon of bilingual language acquisition in Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and the higher-order subgrouping of Malayo-Polynesian—right here.
18 September 2023: My paper on Split Inalienable Coding, a previously unrecognised phenomenon in which a language has two or more possessive coding strategies that are closely or exclusively associated with expressing inalienable possession, is out now in the latest volume of STUF! It sits proudly alongside several other papers on the intricacies of possession in the languages of Wallacea, many of which are Open Access—have a dig around!
laura [dot] arnold [at] ed.ac.uk
University of Edinburgh
Dugald Stewart Building
3 Charles Street
Edinburgh, EH8 9AD
United Kingdom