Thomas E. Payne

Ph.D., UCLA (1985)
Email: tpayne@uoregon.edu
Phone: (541) 342-6706
Website: www.uoregon.edu/~tpayne

Thomas E. Payne, Research Associate, specializes in grammatical description within the typological and functional tradition. His areal interests include the indigenous languages of Central and South America,
the Pacific, Africa and Siberia.

Dr. Payne also serves as Academic Director of the Oregon Summer Institute of Linguistics, and is an International Linguistics Consultant for SIL International . In this capacity he has traveled in many parts of the world, conducting seminars and workshops for linguistic fieldworkers who are involved in grammatical description, and encouraging native speakers of endangered languages to write grammars, dictionaries and text collections in their own languages.

Thomas Payne also hosts the "Linguistic Challenge," a good-natured competitive activity in which secondary school students solve linguistic puzzles in languages they have never learned.