Jane Simpson (linguist)

Simpson completed both a B.A. (Hons) and M.A. at The Australian National University. Her B.A. included majors in Chinese and English literature, with Honours in Middle English. Jane's PhD. was received from MIT in 1983, and her dissertation was a detailed study of Warlpiri in the Lexical-Functional Grammar framework.

Jane Simpson is an Australian linguist.

Simpson's research focuses on the Indigenous languages of Australia. She has worked extensively with the Warumungu language, and in this work assisted in setting up a language centre in Tennant Creek.[1] She also helped to create the a digital archive of Aboriginal language material, which became ASEDA.[2] This was during her time as a Visiting Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. She has published on a wide range of topics related to the languages of Australia, including language change, discourse and grammatical structure, morphosyntax, semantics, and lexicon. She was Chief Investigator, with Gillian Wigglesworth and Patrick McConvell, in the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Projects, funded by ARC Discovery Grants (2004-2007, 2011-2015).[3][4]

In 2005, Simpson shared the Linguistics Society of America Summer Institute Inaugural Ken Hale Chair with Mary Laughren and David Nash.[5] She is now Deputy Director of the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language at ANU.[6] From 1989-2010 Simpson taught at The University of Sydney in their linguistics department. From 2011-2014 she was the inaugural chair of Indigenous linguistics and head of the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at ANU.