Randy John LaPolla () is a professor and former Head of Division at th
Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies
in

Nanyang Technological University The Nanyang Technological University (NTU) is a national research university in Singapore. It is the second oldest autonomous university in the country and is considered as one of the most prestigious universities in the world by various inte ...

. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, elected 2008. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at the Center for Language Sciences at

Beijing Normal University Beijing Normal University (BNU, ), colloquially known as Beishida (), is a public research university located in Beijing, China, with a strong emphasis on humanities and sciences. It is one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in China ...

's Zhuhai campus, and Associate Fellow of CLASS,

. LaPolla has done research in various areas of linguistics. He has worked on the typology and morphosyntactic patterns of Sino-Tibetan languages, examined methodology for carrying out linguistic work in these languages and also done language documentation in Qiang and Dulong/Rawang. He is well known as the author of a grammar of Qiang (LaPolla and Huang 2003) and as the coauthor of

Van Valin A van is a type of road vehicle used for transporting goods or people. Depending on the type of van, it can be bigger or smaller than a pickup truck and SUV, and bigger than a common car. There is some varying in the scope of the word across th ...

and LaPolla (1997), a major work in Role and Reference Grammar. As a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, LaPolla was part of James Matisoff's

STEDT The ''Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus'' (commonly abbreviated ''STEDT'') was a linguistics research project hosted at the University of California at Berkeley. The project, which focused on Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics, ...

project. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1990 at the University of California, Berkeley. He was first a researcher at the

Academia Sinica Academia Sinica (AS, la, 1=Academia Sinica, 3=Chinese Academy; ), headquartered in Nangang, Taipei, is the national academy of Taiwan. Founded in Nanking, the academy supports research activities in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from ...

from 1990 to 1998, then was an associate professor at the City University of Hong Kong from 1996 to 2004. From 2004 to 2012 he was the Chair of Linguistics (Chair Professor) at La Trobe University. A Cheung Kong Scholar from 2005 to 2008, he also led the Australian Linguistic Society as its President from 2007 to 2009.

Selected publications

*''A Grammar of Qiang, with Annotated Texts and Glossary'' (Mouton Grammar Library 31), by Randy J. LaPolla, with Chenglong Huang. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 445 + xvii pp., Dec. 2003 (). *''The Sino-Tibetan Languages'' (Routledge Language Family Series 3), edited by Graham Thurgood & Randy J. LaPolla. London & New York: Routledge, 727 + xxii pp., Jan. 2003 (). Paperback version released April 2007 (). *Rawang Texts, with Grammatical Analysis and English Translation, by Randy J. LaPolla & Dory Poa. Muenchen: LINCOM EUROPA, December 2001 (). *''Syntax: Structure, Meaning, and Function'' (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics Series), by Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. & Randy J. LaPolla. Cambridge University Press, 1997 ().

References

External links

Personal web pageLaPolla's academia.edu page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lapolla, Randy Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Linguists from Australia Linguists of Sino-Tibetan languages