The Semantics of Clause Linking

R. M. W. Dixon is Adjunct Professor at the Cairns Institute, James Cook University. His pioneering fieldwork on Australian Aboriginal languages began in the 1960s and led, among many other works, to grammars of Dyirbal and Yidiñ, culminating in Australian Languages: Their nature and development (CUP 2002). His other books include A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian (U Chicago Press 1988), Ergativity (CUP, 1994), The Rise and Fall ofLanguages (CUP 1997) and A Semantic Approach to English Grammar (OUP 2005). The hardback edition of The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (OUP 2004) was winner of the 2004-5 Leonard Bloomfield Prize.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) andWarekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (Cambridge University Press, 2003), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American languages.Other books include Classifiers: a Typology of Noun Categorization Devices (2000, paperback 2003), Language Contact in Amazonia (2002) 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.