Dr Mae Carroll

I am a research fellow  School of Culture, History & Language at the Australian National University.

I am currently working on developing computational resources for Pacific Creole Languages (Tok Pisin, Solomon's Pijin and Bislama).

Prior to this, I have worked on language documentation and description in West Papua, specifically on the Yei language. This was funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme. I have also been a British Academy Newton International Fellow hosted at the Surrey Morphology Group where I am an ongoing visiting scholar. 

I completed my PhD in 2017 at the Australian National University. My research was a description of Ngkolmpu, a Yam language spoken in West Papua, along with a discussion of issues in morphological theory and typology. 

I am fascinated by the exuberant and finely detailed structures found in languages which linguists call 'morphological complexity.' I explore this using traditional qualitative linguistics (description, typology and historical linguistics) enhanced with computational and mathematical approaches. 

I am interested in role that variation, function and adaptation might play in explaining linguistic structures.

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.

• PhD (Australian National University)
• BA (Hons I) (University of Sydney)

• Kira Davey. PhD thesis: TBD
• Zurab Baratashvili. PhD thesis: A Grammar of Ipiko.
• Aarin Tirza Sirima. PhD thesis: Middles in Austronesian languages.

• Tina Gregor. PhD thesis: A Documentation and Description of Yelmek (a Papuan language of Southern New Guinea)

• 2019-2021. Pan-dialectal documentation of the Yei Language. Funder: Endangered Languages Documentation Programme. Host: ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University.
• 2017-2019. A typology of distributed exponence. Newton International Fellowship. Funder: British Academy. Host: Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey, UK.
• Yamfinder: Southern New Guinea Lexical Database. I run and manage the comparative lexical database of southern New Guinea. 
• New Fields for Morphology Workshop. International conference bringing together fieldworkers and morphologists. In collaboration w/ Prof Rachel Nordlinger