
Felix Ameka
Felix K. Ameka is a socio-cultural cognitive linguist working on the intersection of grammar, meaning and culture. His empirical specialisation is on West-African languages. He works at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), The Netherlands where he is the designated CIPSH/CIPL Chair of Ethnolinguistic vitality and diversity in the world. 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 (FAHA) in 2019. Earlier, in 2015 he was elected a Fellow of The Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (FGA).
After undergraduate training at the University of Ghana, Legon, Ameka received his MA (1986) and PhD in 1991 from the 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. One of his current projects is a collaborative field-based documentation of Gbe and Ghana Togo Mountain languages in their multilingual ecologies using ethnographic and experimental methods. Together with Deborah Hill he is co-editing a volume on language, linguistics and development practice.
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 (WOCAL) and of the Netherlands Association of African Studies (NVAS). He also serves on the Executive Council of the West African Linguistics Society (WALS).





