Research

Robert's research interests focus on language documentation, language change, language contact and language variation. In 2007 he published a book on the morphological foundations of the Germanic strong verbs with Mouton de Gruyter, as well as papers in refereed journals and volumes on their development in German and English. In addition, he has worked on the prehistory of Proto-Germanic and the other languages of Europe and has advanced etymological proposals for hitherto unexplained Germanic vocabulary. Besides morphology, Robert Mailhammer has also undertaken research in historical English phonology and language contact phenomena in Modern Standard German. He is currently working on Amurdak, a non-Pama-Nyungan language from Northern Arnhem Land, Australia. The main objectives of this project are to promote the synchronic grammatical understanding of this nearly extinct language, as well as to transcribe and to translate existing language recordings. So far this has led to new insights into the grammatical system of Amurdak as well as a book with Amurdak texts which was published in 2009 (co-authored with Robert Handelsmann). The project is linked with other projects and research on languages in Northern Arnhem Land and also aims at comparative and historical research. Planned publications include a grammar as well as the edition of draft dictionary together with Robert Handelsmann.