William Foley is Professor Emeritus in the Discipline of Linguistics within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney, where he served for 30 years as University Professor and Head of the Department. He holds an AB degree from Brown University and MA and PhD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. His academic career has focused on syntactic theory and typology as well as sociocultural linguistics. Foley has conducted extensive long-term fieldwork in remote villages of New Guinea and specializes in Papuan languages, Austronesian languages of insular Southeast Asia, and languages of the wider Pacific. His research explores language typology, grammatical theory, anthropological linguistics, language contact, clause linkage, voice systems, and information structure, emphasizing the integration of theoretical insights with detailed descriptive documentation of linguistic structures and communicative practices.

Foley's major publications include the seminal book Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar (1984, co-authored with Robert D. Van Valin Jr.), The Papuan Languages of New Guinea (1986), The Yimas Language of New Guinea (1991), and Anthropological Linguistics: An Introduction (1997). Other key works are The Languages of New Guinea (2000), Events and Serial Verb Constructions (2010), and contributions to volumes such as The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis (2017). His scholarship has garnered over 11,800 citations on Google Scholar, reflecting substantial impact in anthropological linguistics, Papuan and Austronesian language studies, and grammatical typology. Foley was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA) in 1989. He currently holds an adjunct professorship at Columbia University.

Professional Email: william.foley@sydney.edu.au