Felix_Ameka
Felix Ameka
Ghanaian linguist
Felix Ameka (1957) is a linguist working on the intersection of grammar, meaning and culture. His empirical specialisation is on West-African languages.[1] He is currently professor of Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Vitality at Leiden University[2] and teaches in the departments of Linguistics, African Languages and cultures, and African Studies.[3] 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.[4]
After undergraduate training at the University of Ghana, Legon, Ameka received his PhD in 1991 from Australian National University 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, editing a highly influential special issue on 'the universal yet neglected part of speech'.[5] Ameka has pioneered research on the interaction of grammar, culture, and social structure, using the framework of Natural Semantic Metalanguage to elucidate cultural scripts and interactional resources.[6] 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[7] 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.[8]
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.[9]
