Malcolm Ross (linguist)

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For other people with the same name, see Malcolm Ross (disambiguation).

Malcolm Ross
Born
Malcolm David Ross

3 May 1942
London, United Kingdom
NationalityAustralian and British
OccupationLinguist
Academic background
Academic work
InstitutionsAustralian National University
Main interestsPapuan languages, Austronesian languages

Malcolm David Ross (born 1942) is an Australian linguist. He is the emeritus professor of linguistics at the Australian National University.

Ross is best known among linguists for his work on Austronesian and Papuan languages, historical linguistics, and language contact (especially metatypy). He was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1996.[1]

Career[]

Ross served as the Principal of in Papua New Guinea from 1980 to 1982, during which time he self-statedly become interested in local languages, and began to collect data on them. In 1986, he received his PhD from the ANU under the supervision of Stephen Wurm, Bert Voorhoeve and Darrell Tryon.[2] His dissertation was on the genealogy of the Oceanic languages of western Melanesia, and contained an early reconstruction of Proto Oceanic.[3] It also introduced the concept of a linkage, a group of languages that evolves via dialect differentiation rather than by tree-like splits.

Together with Andrew Pawley and , Ross has contributed to the Proto-Oceanic Lexicon Project, which has produced several volumes of reconstructed Proto-Oceanic vocabulary in various semantic domains.[4]

More recently, Ross has published on Formosan languages, Papuan languages and the reconstruction of Proto-Austronesian phonology and syntax.

Notes[]

  1. ^ AHA website Archived 2015-04-02 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ ANU Press website
  3. ^ Ross, Malcolm (1988). Proto Oceanic and the Austronesian languages of western Melanesia. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. ISBN 0858833670.
  4. ^ Oceanic Lexicon Project homepage

External links[]

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