Randy LaPolla on The Creation of Meaning

Sydney Centre for Language Research

Hosted by the Sydney Centre for Language Research, Professor Randy LaPolla gave a presentation on ‘The Creation of Meaning’ on 21 May 2021. Professor LaPolla is Professor of Linguistics with an appointment in Chinese in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He was at La Trobe University in Australia for many years and has held posts at the City University of Hong Kong and Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He was trained at the University of California in Berkeley, where his highly distinguished dissertation committee consisted of James Matisoff, Robert Van Valin, and Johanna Nichols. Professor LaPolla continues to work in a range of domains of Sino-Tibetan linguistics, linguistic typology, historical linguistics, pragmatics, and anthropological linguistics. Among Randy LaPolla’s notable publications are his Grammar of Qiang (a Sino-Tibetan language of Sichuan Province), his Rawang-English-Burmese Dictionary, his Cambridge textbook on Syntax (co-authored with Robert Van Valin), his reference blockbuster on Sino-Tibetan languages (co-edited with Graham Thurgood), and his 2015 book Language Structure and Environment (co-edited with Rik DeBusser).