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