XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

In this work, life, career and other interesting facts about Robert Malcolm Ward Dixon are considered.

Robert Malcolm Ward Dixon (Gloucester, England, 25 January 1939) is a Professor of Linguistics at The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Queensland, and formerly Director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.

Early life

Dixon was born in Gloucester, in the west of England, in 1939, and as a child lived at Stroud and later at Bramcote near Nottingham, where his father became principal of the People's College of Further Education. He was educated at Nottingham High School and then at the University of Oxford, where he took his first degree in mathematics in 1960, and finally at the University of Edinburgh, where he was a Research Fellow in Statistical Linguistics in the English department from July 1961 to September 1963. After that until September 1964 he did field work for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in north-east Queensland, working on several of the Aboriginal languages of Australia, but taking a particular interest in Dyirbal.

Married, April 1963 – January 1986. Three children — Eelsha (born Sunday 12 January 1964), a corporate treasury analyst; Fergus (born Monday 6 June 1966), an electrical engineer; Rowena (born Thursday 21 September 1967), an airline pilot for Qantas.

In June 1992, at the University of Campinas in Brazil, met Alexandra (Sasha) Aikhenvald (born in Moscow, Sunday 1 September 1957). She moved to Canberra in February 1994 on being awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the Australian Research Council. Gained a de facto stepson, Michael Rudov (born Tuesday 4 August 1981), a student of Asian (and other) languages, an artist and a charity worker.

Career

Research

Dixon has written on many areas of linguistic theory and fieldwork, being particularly noted for his work on the languages of Australia. He has published grammars of Dyirbal and Yidiny as well as non-Australian languages such as Boumaa Fijian and Jarawara.

Dixon's work in historical linguistics has been both influential and controversial. His views began to depart "rather radically" from accepted views regarding the historical relationships among Australian languages about four decades ago. Dixon rejects the concept of Pama–Nyungan languages. He also proposes that the standard "family-tree" model of linguistic change is only applicable in some circumstances, thinking that a "punctuated equilibrium" model, based on the theory of the same name in evolutionary biology, is more appropriate for the Australian languages. Dixon puts forth his theory in The Rise and Fall of Languages, refined in his monograph Australian Languages: their nature and development (Cambridge University Press, 2002). This work is not, however, widely accepted amongst Australianists.

Dixon is the author of a number of other books including Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development Cambridge University Press and Ergativity. His monumental three-volume work, Basic Linguistic Theory (2010-2012), was published by the Oxford University Press.

Academic positions

In 1996, Dixon and another linguist, Alexandra Aikhenvald, established the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at the Australian National University in Canberra. On 1 January 2000, the centre relocated to La Trobe University in Melbourne.

Both Dixon (the Director of the centre) and Aikhenvald (Associate Director) resigned their positions in May 2008.

In early 2009, Aikhenvald and Dixon established the Language and Culture Research Group (LCRG) at the Cairns campus of James Cook University. This has been transformed into a Language and Culture Research Centre within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at JCU, Cairns, in 2011. Currently, Professor Aikhenvald is Director and Prof Dixon Deputy Director of the Centre.

Non-academic publications

In addition to scholarly works, Dixon also published, in 1983, a memoir of his early fieldwork in Australia titled Searching For Aboriginal Languages. The book provides a glimpse at linguistic fieldwork as it was done in that era, as well as an interesting historical look at the appalling treatment of Aboriginal peoples of Australia that continued right into the 1960s.

His scholarly autobiography, I am a linguist, was published by Brill in 2011. During the 1960s, Dixon published two science-fiction short stories under the name of Simon Tully, and in the 1980s two detective novels under the name of Hosanna Brown.

Dixon is also the co-author, with John Godrich, of the definitive discography of American prewar blues and gospel recordings, Blues and Gospel Records: 1890–1943.

Qualifications

University of London: PhD in Linguistics, 1968. Thesis title: The Dyirbal language of North Queensland

Australian National University: Doctor of Letters, 1991 (by examination of published work - four books and five papers)

Membership of Learned Societies

Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (elected 1998)

Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (elected 1982)

Member of Linguistic Society of America since 1962; elected Honorary Member 1987 (the number of Honorary Members is limited to 40 by the LSA constitution; they are spread over 25 countries)

Member of the Australian Linguistic Society since 1977; Vice-President1977-80; President 1980-82

Member of the Philological Society, London, since 1962

Research Interests

Theoretically-informed description of previously undescribed languages, especially those from Australia, Amazonia and Oceania

Inductive generalizations concerning the nature of human language

Reconstructing past stages of languages and ways in which modern languages develop, in a principled fashion, from putative ancestor languages

Documentation of the indigenous languages of Australia, with particular reference to those of the Cairns-Townsville area

Selected Publications

Dixon, R.M.W., (1972) The Dyirbal language of North Queensland. Cambridge: (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 9). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xiv, 420 pp. Paperback edition for Australian market, 1973; for remainder of world, 1976.

Dixon, R.M.W., (1977) A grammar of Yidin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dixon, R.M.W., (1982). Where have all the adjectives gone? And other essays in semantics and syntax. Berlin:Mouton.

Dixon, R.M.W., (1988). A grammar of Boumaa Fijian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press..

Dixon, R.M.W., (1994). Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dixon, R.M.W., and Koch, Grace (1996). Dyirbal song poetry:The oral literature of an Australian rainforest people. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. If you would like to hear these songs click on the link below:

Dixon, R.M.W., (1997) The rise and fall of languages. Cambridge University Press. vi, 169 pp. Published simultaneously in hard and paper editions;paperback reprinted 1998, 2000. Japanese translation, Gengo no kobo, translated by Midori Osumi, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. 240 pp,2001. Arabic and Chinese translations in progress.

Dixon, R.M.W., (2002) Australian languages: their nature and development.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xlii, 736 pp.Paperback edition 2007.

Dixon, R.M.W., (2004) The Jarawara language of southern Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Recipient of Leonard Bloomfield Award, from the Linguistic Society of America, as the best book across all field of linguistics published worldwide between March 2003 and February 2005.

Dixon, R.M.W.,(2005) A semantic approach to English grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. xvii, 543 pp. Published simultaneously in hard and paper editions.

Dixon, R.M.W.,(2010) Basic linguistic theory, Volume 1, Methodology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dixon, R.M.W.,(2010) Basic linguistic theory, Volume 2, Grammatical topics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dixon, R.M.W.,(2011) I am a linguist. Leiden: Brill

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y, and Dixon, R.M.W.(2011). Language at large: Essays on syntax and semantics. Leiden: Brill

Dixon, R.M.W.,(2012) Basic linguistic theory, Volume 3, Further grammatical topics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Plus five other books on linguistics, 20 edited volumes, 120 scholarly papers, two novels and one discography.

References:

WikipediA, Robert M.W. Dixon [Electronic resource] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._W._Dixon

James Cook University, Research Portfolio [Electronic resource] - https://research.jcu.edu.au/portfolio/robert.dixon/

People Pill, Robert M.W. Dixon [Electronic resource] - https://peoplepill.com/people/r-m-w-dixon/

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