Career
He is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, elected 2008. He has done research in various areas of linguistics. He has worked on the typology and morphosyntactic patterns of Sino-Tibetan languages, examined methodology for carrying out linguistic work in these languages and also done language documentation in Qiang and Dulong/Rawang.
He is well known as the author of a grammar of Qiang (LaPolla and Huang 2003) and as the coauthor of Van Valin and LaPolla (1997), a major work in Role and Reference Grammar.
LaPolla obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in 1990 at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2004 to 2012 he was the Chair of Linguistics (Chair Professor) at Louisiana Trobe University.
A Cheung Kong Scholar from 2005 to 2008, he also led the Australian Linguistic Society as its President from 2007 to 2009.