Felix K. Ameka

Felix K. Ameka lectures in the Department of African Languages and Cultures of Leiden University and is also an Associate Researcher of the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. He obtained a BA (first class honours) in Linguistics from the University of Ghana, Legon-Accra (1980) and an MA (1986) and PhD (1991) in Linguistics from the Australian National University. He has a wide range of interests and has fieldwork experience in Australia and West Africa. Apart from the description and documentation of languages, he is interested in the cultural, cognitive and human social interactional motivations of grammar and how speakers use grammar. He has conducted field-based research and published extensively on the grammar, semantics, and pragmatics of Ewe, his mother tongue, and on other West African languages like Akan. He is currently involved in and coordinates the documentation of four of the little studied Ghana-Togo-Mountain languages: Likpe, Logba, Nyagbo and Tafi. These languages are massively influenced by surrounding bigger languages like Ewe and Akan.

As a trained linguist who has worked on his native language and on other languages, he has a continuing concern about the role of native knowledge in documentary linguistics and how the different types of expertise can be tapped in a collaborative manner to generate optimal records of languages. He is also interested in the challenges that documentary linguistics poses for linguistic training and academic linguistic practices.

His other research interests lie in typology and comparative grammar; anthropological linguistics, ethnography of communication, cross-cultural semantics and pragmatics. He is also interested in how the structure and semantics of languages are affected and modulated over time and when they come into contact with other languages.