Affiliate members

Professor R M W (Bob) Dixon 

R. M. W. (Bob) Dixon is an Adjunct Professor at CQUniversity Cairns Campus.
It could be said that Bob Dixon sports a linguistic cloak of many colours. For forty years, he revelled in on-the-spot fieldwork—in Brazil (The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia, 2004), in the South Pacific (A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian, 1988), and especially in Australia (grammars of Dyirbal, 1972, and Yidiñ, 1977, amongst others). He has also published two general books on Australian languages (1980 and 2002). Being equally intrigued with his native language, he has published A Semantic Approach to English Grammar (1991, 2905), Making New Words: Morphological Derivation in English (2014), and English Prepositions: their Meanings and Uses (2021). Bob Dixon also enjoys looking for inductive generalisations which reveal the nature of human language, resulting in Ergativity (1979, 1994), and the three-volume Basic Linguistic Theory (2010, 2012), among other works. His enterprise extends outwards from these foci to kinship systems, the poetry of songs, and the nature of linguistic evolution (with The Rise and Fall of Languages, 1997 and Are Some Languages Better than Others? 2015). He has been inspired by the linguistic acumen, insight, and integrity of Alexandra Aikhenvald, with whom he has had a long and prosperous partnership, as recounted in his academic autobiography I am a Linguist (Brill 2011).