Alex François

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris

Alex François is a research fellow in the department of Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale (LACITO) of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is also currently a long-term visitor at the Australian National University. He has conducted fieldwork on a number of hitherto undescribed, and often endangered, Oceanic (Austronesian) languages from Vanuatu and the Solomons Islands. He works on the description and analysis of these languages, both in their typological and historical dimensions. He is the author of Araki: A Disappearing Language of Vanuatu (2002), and La Sémantique du Prédicat en Mwotlap (2003). His research interests include phonological systems and sound change, the typology of polysemy and lexical semantics, reference tracking and pragmatics, historical linguistics, language geography and areal phenomena. He also has ongoing collaborative projects in language maintenance, ethnomusicology, oral literature and verbal art.