Felix Ameka

Felix Ameka (1957) is a linguist working on the intersection of grammar, meaning and culture.

His empirical specialisation is on West-African languages.

He is currently professor of Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Vitality at Leiden University and teaches in the departments of Linguistics, African Languages and cultures, and African Studies.

After undergraduate training at the University of Ghana, Legon, Ameka received his PhD in 1991 from Australian National University for a dissertation on the semantic, functional, and discourse-pragmatic aspects of the grammar of Ewe.

Ameka has made seminal contributions to the cross-linguistic study of interjections, editing a highly influential special issue on 'the universal yet neglected part of speech'.

Ameka has pioneered research on the interaction of grammar, culture, and social structure, using the framework of Natural Semantic Metalanguage to elucidate cultural scripts and interactional resources.

A long-term research associate at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics, Ameka has led a large-scale comparative project on the semantics of locative predicates and contributed to cross-linguistic work on the expression of motion events.

With Alan Dench and Nick Evans, he co-edited an influential collection on the art of grammar writing.

Ameka is editor of the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics together with Azeb Amha.

Since 2015, Ameka is President of the World Congress of African Linguistics.

In recognition of his pioneering work on cross-cultural semantics and his long-standing research ties with Australian universities, he was elected as a Corresponding Fellow to the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2019.