Cliff Goddard

Biography

Professor Goddard’s main research interests are in lexical and grammatical semantics, language description and typology, and ethnopragmatics. He has made important theoretical contributions toward the development of the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) approach to meaning in language, in conjunction with the leading figure in this field Professor Anna Wierzbicka. He has worked extensively on the lexicon and grammar of Western Desert Language of Central Australia (Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara dialects), and on the cultural semantics and ethnopragmatics of Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Cliff has published numerous articles in journals such as Studies in Language, Language Sciences, Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Language & Communication, Anthropological Linguistics, Australian Journal of Linguistics, and Culture & Psychology. With Anna Wierzbicka, he is co-editor of Semantic and Lexical Universals-Theory and Empirical Findings (Benjamins, 1994) and Meaning and Universal Grammar (Benjamins, 2002). He also edited the collective volumes Ethnopragmatics: Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context (Mouton, 2006), Cross-Linguistic Semantics (Benjamins, 2008) and Minimal English for a Global World (Palgrave, in press). He is author of the textbooks Semantic Analysis: A Practical Introduction (OUP, 2nd ed. 2011) and The Languages of East and Southeast Asia (OUP, 2006). His latest book, co-authored with Anna Wierzbicka, is titled Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics across Domains, Languages and Cultures (OUP, 2014). For much of his career, Cliff was at the University of New England. He is presently Professor of Linguistics at Griffith University, Queensland.