William A. Foley

William A. Foley (William Auguste "Bill" Foley; born 1949) is an American linguist and professor at Columbia University. He previously worked at the University of Sydney. He specializes in Papuan and Austronesian languages. Foley developed Role and Reference Grammar in a partnership with Robert Van Valin.

Career In 1986, Foley published The Papuan Languages of New Guinea through Cambridge University Press. In 1991, his book The Yimas Language of New Guinea was published by Stanford University Press. In 1997, his book Anthropological Linguistics, "the first comprehensive textbook in anthropological linguistics" was published with an introduction by Noam Chomsky.

Foley was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1989.

Works William A. Foley and Robert D. Van Valin, Jr (1984). Functional syntax and universal grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. William A. Foley (1986). The Papuan Languages of New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . Google Books William A. Foley (1991). The Yimas Language of New Guinea. Stanford: Stanford University Press. William A. Foley (1997). Anthropological Linguistics: an introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. William A. Foley (2005). "Linguistic prehistory in the Sepik - Ramu basin." In: Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide and Jack Golson, eds, Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples, 109–144. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

William A.Foley (2022) "A Sketch Grammar of Kopar". Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton