Rate My Professor Brett Baker

Professor Brett Baker is Professor in Linguistics in the School of Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Melbourne. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Sydney, awarded in 1999, and a Bachelor's Degree with Honours from the same university. Baker has served at the University of Melbourne since at least 2010, initially as Associate Professor in Linguistics before his promotion to Professor. Since the mid-1990s, he has collaborated with speakers of Indigenous Australian languages in Arnhem Land through grassroots organizations such as the Katherine and Ngukurr Aboriginal Language Centres. His fieldwork experience spans over 25 years, informing his teaching on these languages and supervision of students documenting them firsthand at the University of Melbourne.

Baker's research specializations encompass phonology, morphology, speech processing, and the grammatical structures of Australian Indigenous languages, with a focus on Gunwinyguan languages including Ngalakgan and Wubuy, as well as Iwaidja and Mawng. He led the Australian Research Council Discovery Project from 2018 to 2021, investigating the cognitive representation of super-complex words in Wubuy—polysynthetic forms equivalent to English sentences—using low-tech experimental methods in collaboration with Professor Janet Fletcher and Dr Rikke Bundgaard-Nielsen. Key publications include "Word Structure in Australian Languages" (with Mark Harvey, Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2003), "Morphology in Australian Languages" (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics), "Super-Complexity and the Status of 'Word' in Gunwinyguan Languages of Australia," "Lenition, Fortition, and Lexical Access in Iwaidja and Mawng," and "Epenthetic Prefixation in Alawa and Marra" (Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2020). He co-edited "Discourse and Grammar in Australian Languages" and edited "Indigenous Language and Social Identity: Papers in Honour of Michael Walsh" (Pacific Linguistics, 2014). Baker's scholarship, cited over 1,370 times on Google Scholar, has advanced understanding of word status, perceptual epenthesis, and complex morphology in Australian languages.