Current Research of each Team Member:
Uta Reinöhl's primary research interests are in language typology and language change. While she has a primary focus on morpho-syntax, she generally takes a holistic approach drawing on other fields such as
semantics, information structure or prosody in order to develop insightful theoretical accounts. In the context of her Emmy Noether Group, she and her team investigate the cross-linguistic diversity of
complex expressions in languages that challenge traditional assumptions of phrasal structure given their more flexible word class systems. Some of Uta Reinöhl's primary foci in this regard include work on nominal espressions in Australian languages and Vedic Sanskrit, General typological work on NP structures together with Dr. Dana Louagie, and work on serial verb constructions including in Kera'a, a language that Uta Reinöhl started a fieldwork project on about three years ago. Uta Reinöhl currently leads another two research projects besides her Emmy Noether Group, namely a project on "Agent prominence and the diachrony of predication in Indo-Aryan" (with Prof. Gerrit Dimmendaal, SFB 1252,
University of Cologne) and "VedaWeb", a collaborative project building a collaborative resarch environment for work on Indo-Aryan texts. Currently, Uta Reinöhl is the interim Professor of General Linguistics at LMU Munich. See her webpage for more information.
Naomi Peck is researching spoken Kera'a (aka Idu Mishmi), a Tibeto-Burman language of northeastern India. She just returned from her first fieldtrip and is now busy building up a language documentation corpus. Her PhD project is a grammar of Kera'a of the Dibang Valley region with a focus on morpho-syntax. For the NonGram project, she collects, annotates and analyzes nuclear verb serialization patterns.
Kirsten Culhane is researching Waima'a, an Austronesian language spoken in Eastern Timor.
For the NonGram project, she is examining serial verb constructions, which are highly productive and prevalent in the language. For her PhD dissertation, she is examining diagnostics of
the prosodic foot and its cross-linguistic compatibility, using evidence from languages of Timor.
Maria Vollmer is currently researching Warlpiri, a Pama-Nyungan language spoken in Central Australia. For the NonGram project, she analyses its nominal structures regarding flexible word classes and disjoint noun phrases. She is currently developing her PhD topic which will be related to the interplay of syntax and information structure in Warlpiri.
Mercator Fellow Dr. T. Mark Ellison works on two topics in the project: Semantically driven properties of communication - an interest pursued in another collaboration with the lead investigator of this project, Uta Reinöhl. The idea is that general properties of the semantics of what is communicated have an impact on the form that the communication takes. This project investigates what guides structure when part-of-speech and consequently syntax are not in play. Consequently, the impact of other linguistic influences - semantic, pragmatic, information-structural - come to the fore. Also, computational methods for speech analysis and segmentation - something most field linguists need. Anything which reduces the time needed to turn a field recording into a transcribed, translated and analysed text is of great benefit to descriptive linguists. All the linguists on the project engaged in field work can benefit from the tools that are available, and any tailoring of tools to the languages being studied.