For the last few years my main involvements have been in the Oceanic Lexicon Project (a project of the Department of Linguistics) and in various aspects of Formosan (Taiwan) and Papuan (New Guinea) historical linguistics.

Career highlights

Principal of Goroka Teachers' College (UPNG) (1980-82); Visiting Professor, Dept of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Frankfurt (1993, 1998-99); Guest Scientist, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig (2002, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014); Visiting Professor, Academia Sinica, Taipei (2003, 2008–2009), Visiting Professor, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, and National Taiwan University, Taipei (2008–2009), Hermann and Klara H. Collitz Professor at the 2009 Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America at the University of California at Berkeley; Visiting Scholar, Laboratoire “Langues et civilisations à tradition orale” (LACITO) UMR 7107 du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Villejuif, Paris, France.

Austronesian and Papuan languages, theory of language change, contact-induced language change, historical change in grammatical constructions.