Elizabeth Pearce

Not long after Fort St, in a wintery July in 1954, the family, and of course me along with the family, moved to Melbourne. This was also the time for my transition from the public school system (in the guise of NSGHS) to a small convent school and from usually being the only Catholic kid in the class to being the only one, it seemed, who didn’t have priests, nuns or brothers among their relatives. Hard work for the nuns to get me into shape.

After school, I did BA, DipEd at Melbourne Uni and then taught in high schools for an obligatory three years before I was able to go and live in Paris for a while – which turned out to be four years. A boring office job which I started off with there had the effect of catapaulting me back into being a student again. I got a licence-ès-lettres (in 1968) and then embarked on a doctorate, called: ‘L’esthétique théâtrale d’Antonin Artaud’ no less. After much reading (in addition to seeing lots of theatre and films), but without any clear idea of what I was doing, I ultimately decided to tear myself away and head back to Australia.

The next step in my very long career as a student was that I discovered generative linguistics in the course of doing an MA in French at Monash. It took me a very long time to finish the MA (thesis on tout, tous, chaque and chacun), whilst also doing some tutoring at Melbourne, and then I went to U of Illinois for the PhD. My stretch at Illinois included eight months in Italy at Pisa and I ended up with a thesis on Old French syntax. Returning to Australia, there was short term lecturing at Melbourne, then tutoring at LaTrobe, before I then got my first ‘real job’ in Wellington at the age of 45. I am passionate about syntax and I have spent some time trying to understand how Maori sentences fit nicely into a formal model. More recently, I have started doing field work on a previously undescribed language called Unua, which is spoken by about 400 people on the south-east coast of Malakula Island, Vanuatu. I am due to have the manuscript for a book on this ready by about the middle of next year. My other passion is tennis and I am still hanging on to a place in a team in the local competition (despite the awful wind).

I am single and I don’t have any children, but, as the eldest of five, I have lots of nieces and nephews and, up to now, there are five small children for whom I am a great-aunt. I would like to go back to Australia, eventually (where I could at least register a vote against the despicable current prime minister), a Lotto win would help, but I don’t see myself as retiring, not just yet.

Now I just need to find a photo . . . found one eventually

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