Fieldwork in Nusa Tenggara Timur – an interview with Jeroen Willemsen

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[This blog post is part of a three-way interview between Kristoffer Friis Bøegh, Jeroen Willemsen and Ana Paulla Braga Mattos.]

Jeroen Willemsen is a PhD-researcher at Aarhus University. He conducted fieldwork on Reta, a Papuan language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. Besides his work on Reta, he has published on the function and development of applicatives and serial verbs, and is currently writing a descriptive grammar of Reta. We interviewed him in Aarhus about his experiences as a fieldworker.

Can you briefly summarise your descriptive project and the fieldwork you conducted?

I went to the Nusa Tenggara Timur region of Eastern Indonesia to describe a language called Reta. It’s mainly spoken in two small villages in the south of the …