Alexander Robertson Coupe
Associate Professor
Linguistics and Multilingual Studies
School of Humanities
Alexander Coupe was the editor of the internationally peer-reviewed journal ‘Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area’ (now published by John Benjamins) for the period 2012-2017, he has served as a reviewer for the journals ‘Lingua’, ‘Diachronica’, ‘Studies in Language’, ‘Journal of the International Phonetic Association’, ‘Linguistics’, ‘Language & Linguistics’, ‘Himalayan Linguistics’, and ‘Journal of the South East Asian Linguistics Society’, and he has reviewed manuscripts and book proposals for Oxford University Press, Mouton de Gruyter and Springer. He is also regularly requested to review grant applications for the Endangered Languages Documentation Project (UK), the Australian Research Council, the National Science foundation (USA), and the World Oral Literature Project (UK). He is a member of the Association for Linguistic Typology, the Australian Linguistics Society, and serves on the NTU Institutional Review Board.
Research Interests
Alexander Coupe’s major contributions to linguistic research have focused upon the languages of the South Asia/Southeast Asia region. In addition to documenting the grammars of minority and endangered languages – particularly those spoken in Northeast India – he has investigated evidence of contact and linguistic convergence between Austroasiatic, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman languages. This fieldwork-based research is driven by a desire to record and analyse the grammars of poorly understood minority languages, to determine their genetic relationships, to document them for posterity, and to collaborate with speakers to create orthographies for dictionaries and reading books. The output of this work feeds another research goal: to seek functional and diachronic explanations for the structural diversity and commonalities found in human language, and to advance knowledge in the field of linguistic typology.
Specific areas of research interest include the analysis of tone systems, phonetics and phonology, the role of pragmatics in grammar, case-marking systems, morphosyntax, clause linkage, nominalization, grammaticalization, language contact and lexicography.
