Mae Carroll

Research

I am a research fellow at the School of Culture, History & Language at the Australian National University and a visiting follow at the Surrey Morphology Group. Before joining the ANU, I held a Newton International Fellowship hosted in Surrey. 

I am fascinated by the exuberant and finely detailed structures found in languages which linguists call inflectional morphology. I explore this using traditional qualitative linguistics (description, typology and historical linguistics) enhanced with computational and mathematical methodologies. I am particularly interested in how we model inflection from a comprehension or discriminative perspective which I see as especially useful for cross-linguistic comparison.

The core of my work is fieldwork on undescribed and (often) endangered languages of New Guinea. I practice community-led partnerships in language documentation to produce collections of endangered languages serving both scientific and community needs.

Projects

I am currently working on building NLP tools for Pacific Creole Languages: Bislama, Tok Pisin and Solomons Pijin.  

I am also working on the digitisation of the 'Lexicon of proto oceanic.' This involves migrating the  seven volumes reconstructing the lexicon of Proto Oceanic by Malcolm Ross,  Andrew Pawley and Meredith Osmond into an accessible online database.

My most recent completed project was the documentation of the Yei language funded by the wonderful Endangered Language Documentation Programme.

My previous project was a typology of distributed exponence where I am examined the boundaries of redundant structures in morphology across languages from around the world. Funded by the British Academy. [NF160104]

I run the Yamfinder: Southern New Guinea Lexical Database website. A comparative database of core vocabulary from over 30 languages across southern New Guinea. 

Along with Rachel Nordlinger, I organise the New Fields for Morphology Workshop which seeks to bring together linguists working on morphological theory and those with new and exciting data.