Author Biography
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Professor and Research Leader (People and Societies of the Tropics) in the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Australia. She has worked on descriptive and historical aspects of Berber languages and has published, in Russian, a grammar of Modern Hebrew (1990; second edition 2009). She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995, based on work with the last speaker who has since died) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from northwest Amazonia (Cambridge University Press, 2003, paperback 2006), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American languages. Her grammar, The Manambu Language from East Sepik, Papua New Guinea, was published by OUP in 2008, paperback 2010. Other books include Classifiers: a Typology of Noun Categorization Devices (2000, paperback 2003), Language Contact in Amazonia (2002, paperback 2010) and Evidentiality (2004, paperback 2006), all published by OUP. She is co-editor with R. M. W. Dixon of the OUP series Explorations in Linguistic Typology, the fifth volume of which, The Semantics of Clause Linking, appeared in 2009. Her latest book, Languages of the Amazon, was published in 2012 by OUP.
