Rate My Professor Bill Palmer

Palmer's research specializations include spatial language and spatial cognition, particularly spatial frames of reference, linguistic typology, syntax, phonology, Austronesian and Papuan languages, Indigenous languages of Australia, and documentation of endangered languages. He has obtained $2,133,070 in research funding across 28 grants, including lead investigator on ARC Discovery Projects OzSpace ($457,831, 2020), Thinking and talking about atolls ($312,767, 2012), and Endangered Languages Documentation, Theory and Application ($90,000, 2014), as well as contributions to the Time Layered Cultural Map of Australia ($472,543, 2023). He has supervised 14 completed PhD theses on topics such as grammars of Pacific and Australian languages and one current PhD. Key publications comprise edited books The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide (2018) and The Languages and Linguistics of Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific: A Comprehensive Guide (2017); monograph Kokota Grammar (2009); and journal articles including 'Frames of spatial reference in five Australian languages' (Spatial Cognition and Computation, 2021), 'How does the environment shape spatial language? Evidence for sociotopography' (Linguistic Typology, 2017), 'Topography in language: Absolute frame of reference and the topographic correspondence hypothesis' (Language Structure and Environment, 2015), 'Heads in Oceanic indirect possession' (Oceanic Linguistics, 2007), and 'An innovated possessor suffix and category in central Choiseul' (Oceanic Linguistics, 2014).