ELAP PhD graduate - Dr Peter Budd

Dr Peter Budd is the latest ELAP PhD student to graduate with a PhD in Field Linguistics. His research is on the Bierebo language of Epi island, Central Vanuatu.

Peter was one of the first wave of ELAP graduates, taking the inaugural MA in Language Documentation and Description in 2003-4. He was then awarded ELAP and ELDP PhD funding to document the Bierebo language of Vanuatu. He submitted and defended his thesis in 2009 and was awarded his degree in April 2010.

Like many Oceanic languages of the region, Bierebo shows some complexity in its expression of possessive relations, spatial reference, and serial verb constructions, and all of these topics receive detailed accounts in the first part of the thesis. The second part focuses on the verbal categories, Realis and Irrealis, presenting a survey of their contexts of use, and drawing comparisons with ten other languages of the region. The findings reveal a high degree of semantic consistency and demonstrate that these categories cross cut temporal, aspectual, and modal domains.

A previously undescribed language, Bierebo is spoken by fewer than 1000 people in various communities on Epi island. During his time in the field Pete engaged in a number of language support initiatives, establishing a language committee, developing a first orthography of the language, and producing a number of written materials.

Pete has held a number of teaching and research assistantships at SOAS, recently  working with Dr Julia Sallabank on projects related to language revitalisation in the British Isles. He provided lexicography software training to a group of West Papuan linguists in Oxford earlier this year, and has recently submitted a paper on negation in the Epi languages to Oceanic Linguistics.

Congratulations Pete!

For more information about Pete's research, visit his profile page