Dr I Wayan Arka

I WAYAN ARKA is a Fellow in Linguistics at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University. He received his PhD from Sydney University in 1999 with research on Balinese morphosyntax and pragmatics. During the course of his PhD, he was a visiting scholar at CSLI, Stanford University (1995). He was back at Udayana University in Bali-Indonesia for three years before he moved again to Australia (April 2001) to take up a fellowship at the RSPAS, ANU.

Wayan's interests are in descriptive, theoretical and typological aspects of Austronesian and Papuan languages of Indonesia. He has done detailed studies on morpho-syntactic aspects of Balinese and Bahasa Indonesia, within the framework of LFG (Lexical-Functional Grammar). He has recently begun to extend his research on other languages in western and eastern Indonesia such as Nias and Mentawai (Sumatra), Manggarai, Rongga and Lamaholot (Flores), and Kei (south-east of Maluku) focussing on morphosyntactic aspects of core arguments, (pronominal) marking and voice/argument alternations. He has done extensive fieldwork for his Rongga Documentation Project (funded by the ELDP, 2004-6), and organised capacity building programmes for language documentation, maintenance and revitalisation in Indonesia.

Wayan is currently working on a number of projects. He continues working on his Rongga materials and Core Argument Project. He is also currently doing collaborative research on voice in the Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia (funded by an NSF grant, 2006-2009), and a large-scale Indonesian Corpus and Grammar Development Project.