Ruth Singer

My current research focus is the sociolinguistics of multilingualism in a small but highly multilingual community in north-west Arnhem Land. I am also collaborating with Prof Janet Fletcher on intonation and information structure in Mawng, a language of north-west Arnhem Land. I began my research in Linguistics with PhD on the Australian Aboriginal language Mawng, focussing on the semantics of grammatical gender agreement and how this becomes lexicalised together with specific verb senses. Continuing fieldwork on the Mawng language, I then collaborated with phonologists to work on intonation in Mawng. While a postdoctoral fellow with the Language and Cognition group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) and Radboud University (Nijmegen) I contributed to work on large-scale typological comparisons of languages of the Pacific. My research focus between 2008-2010 was expanding the Mawng dictionary database by doing research on traditional ethnobiological knowledge which has resulted in the publication of three bilingual posters about Shellfish, Fish and Plant Medicine. I also helped to document traditional songs sung by Mawng speakers during this time and researched kinship verbs and triangular kinship terms. In 2010 I taught at La Trobe University.