Craig Stansfield

Read about research being undertaken by Craig Stansfield, an MA Thesis student in Linguistics.

Thesis title

Assessing primary-order phylogeny: a reanalysis of Austronesian and a consideration of a wave model

Supervisor

Dr Victoria Chen

Abstract

This research is looking at the primary subgrouping of Austronesian both through a literature review of the existing hypotheses and the evidence for them, and through an investigation from first principles, using the standard comparative method, looking particularly at (i) whether there are any credible alternative protophonemes to those reconstructed within the existing principal hypotheses and (ii) whether closer attention to the phonetic environments in which phonemes occur can reduce the number of correspondence sets that need to be considered in reconstructing the phonology of Proto-Austronesian.

Biography

Craig is doing his MA in linguistics at Te Herenga Waka/the Victoria University of Wellington. He did his BA(Hons) in linguistics at Victoria and also has a Master of Regional and Resource Planning (MRRP) from Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka/the University of Otago.

Presentations

Stansfield, Craig W. J. S. (2023, November 28). Te reo Māori Lehnwörter: strategies for conforming English consonant clusters to Māori syllable structure [Seminar presentation]. Hui Rangahau i te Reo Māori/the Māori Language Research Symposium, Auckland, New Zealand.

Stansfield, Craig W. J. S. (2024, March 15). Te reo Māori Lehnwörter: strategies for conforming English consonant clusters to Māori syllable structure [Seminar presentation]. Victoria University of Wellington Linguistics and Applied Language Studies seminar series, Wellington, New Zealand.