Felix Ameka (1957) is a linguist working on the intersection of grammar, meaning and culture. His empirical specialisation is on West-African languages. He is currently professor of Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Vitality at

Leiden University Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; nl, Universiteit Leiden) is a Public university, public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. The university was founded as a Protestant university in 1575 by William the Silent, William, Prince o ...

and teaches in the departments of Linguistics, African Languages and cultures, and African Studies. In recognition of his pioneering work on cross-cultural semantics and his long-standing research ties with Australian universities, he was elected as a Corresponding Fellow to the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2019. After undergraduate training at the

University of Ghana, Legon The University of Ghana is a public university located in Accra, Ghana. It the oldest and largest of the thirteen Ghanaian national public universities. The university was founded in 1948 as the University College of the Gold Coast in the B ...

, Ameka received his PhD in 1991 from

Australian National University The Australian National University (ANU) is a public research university located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies and ...

for a dissertation on the semantic, functional, and discourse-pragmatic aspects of the grammar of Ewe. Ameka has made seminal contributions to the cross-linguistic study of

interjections An interjection is a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling or reaction. It is a diverse category, encompassing many different parts of speech, such as exclamations ''(ouch!'', ''wow!''), curse ...

, editing a highly influential special issue on 'the universal yet neglected part of speech'. Ameka has pioneered research on the interaction of grammar, culture, and social structure, using the framework of

Natural Semantic Metalanguage The natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is a linguistic theory that reduces lexicons down to a set of semantic primitives. It is based on the conception of Polish professor Andrzej Bogusławski. The theory was formally developed by Anna Wierzbick ...

to elucidate cultural scripts and interactional resources. A long-term research associate at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics, Ameka has led a large-scale comparative project on the semantics of locative predicates and contributed to cross-linguistic work on the expression of motion events. With Alan Dench and Nick Evans, he co-edited an influential collection on the art of grammar writing. Ameka is editor of the ''Journal of African Languages and Linguistics'' together with Azeb Amha. Since 2015, Ameka is President of the World Congress of African Linguistics.

Key publications

* Ameka, Felix K. 1991. ''Ewe. Its Grammatical Constructions and Illucutionary Devices.'' PhD dissertation, Australian National University. * Ameka, Felix K. 1992. 'Interjections. The Universal Yet Neglected Part of Speech.' ''Journal of Pragmatics'' 18 (2–3): 101–18. * Ameka, Felix K., Alan Dench, and Nicholas Evans, eds. 2006. ''Catching Language. The Standing Challenge of Grammar Writing''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. * Ameka, Felix K., and Stephen C. Levinson. 2007. 'Introduction: The Typology and Semantics of Locative Predicates: Posturals, Positionals, and Other Beasts.' ''Linguistics'' 45 (5part6): 847–871. * Ameka, Felix K., and Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu, eds. 2008. ''Aspect and Modality in Kwa Languages''. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

References

External links

Living people Linguists Linguists from Ghana Australian National University alumni Leiden University faculty 1957 births {{Linguist-stub