8831
jarcher@pmu.edu.sa
S-131
Dr Jon Archer is a Linguist from the UK who joined PMU in September 2021. In addition to Jon’s 16+ teaching hours, his research is in Language Documentation and Description, specifically Mùwe Ké, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal spoken by around 3,000 people in the village of Mugu. For his PhD, Jon spent three years high in the Himalaya recording, transcribing, and describing this endangered language. His thesis provides a grammar of Mùwe Ké and investigates the information-structural notion of focus through the morphosyntax of focus structures in the language. Research and fieldwork in more recent years looks at the language of space in Mùwe Ké, which will be used in future work to describe how spatial terms are used metaphorically to describe the concept of time. New ethnolinguistic fieldwork looks at weaving and loom terminology, an ancient art that is being lost along with the language.
Dr Archer hopes to make a valuable contribution to the preparation of the students at PMU in order that they may have a high level of the skills necessary to follow their chosen academic pathways.
Sept 2013 – Aug 2020
PhD in Linguistics
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK.
Thesis: 'Focus Structures in Mùwe Ké: Grammatical Category or Much Ado About Nothing?' (doi)
Supervisors: Prof Irina Nikolaeva, Prof Lutz Marten.
Sept 2007 – Sept 2008
MA in Language Documentation and Description
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK.
Dissertation: 'Why gestural studies are needed for a cross-linguistic view of cognitive modelling.'
Supervisor: Prof Irina Nikolaeva.
Sept 2002 – June 2005
BA (Hons) in Linguistics
University of Sussex, UK.
Dissertation: 'When we store narrative in memory, do we also store the linguistically relevant components that are required by the grammar of that language?'
Supervisor: Prof Vyvyan Evans.
Jan – Feb 1999
Trinity College Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)
Northbrook College, West Sussex, UK.
Archer, Jon. (In preparation). Space and direction in Mùwe Ké.
Archer, Jon. (Under review). Locations, goals, and endpoints: A delineation of the Mùwe Ké la-don.
Archer, Jon. (2025). The Mùwe Ké ergative and its differential marking. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 49(1): 99-131. https://benjamins.com/catalog/ltba.24011.arc
Archer, Jon. (2023). Mùwe Ké focus structures. Himalayan Linguistics, 22(3): 9-33. https://doi.org/10.5070/H922359541
Archer, Jon. (Accepted 2022, forthcoming 2026). Mùwe Ké. In Hildebrandt, Kristine, Yankee Modi, David Peterson, and Hiroyuki Suzuki (eds.) The Oxford Guide to the Tibeto-Burman Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sept 2021 – present
Assistant Professor in the Core Program
College of Sciences and Human Studies
Prince Mohammad University, Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia
Sept 2016 – Aug 2017 and Aug 2009 – Aug 2011
Lecturer for Phonetics & Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Applied Linguistics, and Sociolinguistics
1st, 2nd, and 3rd year BA students
Department of English Language and Literature
Rustaq College of Applied Science, Rustaq, Oman
1999 - 2021 - Teaching English as a Second Language and English for Academic Purposes in Ecuador, Peru, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, UK, New Zealand, UAE, Russia, Nepal, and Kuwait.
At PMU, Jon has taught Written Communication, Writing and Research, and Learning Outcome Assessment.
Language documentation and description, language endangerment, language revitalisation, Tibeto-Burman linguistics, Tibetic languages esp. Mùwe Ké (Mugu, Nepal), information structure, focus structures and their morphosyntax, differential argument/ergative marking, cognitive grammar, the language of space and time.
