Professor Eva Schultze-Berndt
Professor in Linguistics
School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures,
University of Manchester,
Oxford Road,
Manchester
M13 9PL
Office: Samuel Alexander Building, NG12
Phone: +44 (0) 161 306 1732
Email: eva.schultze-berndt@manchester.ac.uk
Office hours: Tues 2-3 p.m., Fri 10-12 a.m.
Research specialisation
My research interests and specializations lie in the following areas:
- Linguistic typology, particularly in the areas of secondary predication, complex predication, overt classification of verbs/events, parts of speech, and information structure
- Construction-based approaches to grammatical analysis
- Syntax of spoken language
- Lexical semantics, in particular the interface between morphosyntax, argument structure and lexical semantics of verbs
- Language contact phenomena, including lexical and grammatical borrowing, code-switching, creole languages, and language shift
- Issues in documentary and descriptive linguistics, including e.g. fieldwork methodology, annotation of corpus data and the structure of reference grammars
These interests have, to a large extent, been inspired by as well as applied to my work on Northern Australian languages. During the last 15 years, I have conducted fieldwork on the Western Mindi (Non-Pama-Nyungan) language Jaminjung and the closely related varieties Ngaliwurru and Nungali. In this context, I have also done some work on the neighbouring but unrelated language Ngarinyman (Ngumpin, Pama-Nyungan) and on Northern Territory Kriol, an English-lexified creole which is now the primary language of communication among the indigeneous people in the area. I am currently heading a documentation project entitled Jaminjungan and Eastern Ngumpin: A documentation of the linguistic and cultural knowledge of speakers in a multilingual setting in the Victoria River District, Northern Australia, involving a multidisciplinary team of researchers and funded by the programme for the documentation of endangered languages (DOBES) of the Volkswagen Foundation. A second project within the same programme has just been granted to Claudia Wegener and myself for the documentation of Savosavo, a Papuan language of the Solomon Islands.
Together with Martina Faller and specialists on Australian languages and Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality in Leuven (B), Paris (F), Perth (AUS) and Melbourne (AUS), I am involved in the project "The interrelation of Tense, Aspect and Modality with Evidentiality in Australian Aboriginal languages (TAMEAL)", funded for the period of 2009-2012 by a EU mobility programme (7th Framework, Marie Curie Actions, International Research Staff Exchange Scheme).
A major documentation project entitled "The painter's eye, the painter's voice" funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) funds Frances Kofod to document significant aspects of the encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural and cultural world of the Gija, another Northern Australian group, with a focus on the mythological, historical and ecological knowledge associated with sites depicted in artists' paintings.
A postdoctoral project with which I am associated as a mentor is conducted by Serge Sagna and also funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP). The goal of this project is the documentation of Gújjolaay Eegimaa (an Atlantic language of Southern Senegal) by compiling a representative digital corpus of audio and video data and a dictionary.
Research students
Candide Simard is currently working on a PhD thesis on the prosody of the Australian language Jaminjung, jointly supervised by myself and Dr Yi Xu (UCL). Candide has conducted fieldwork as part of the ''Jaminjungan and Eastern Ngumpin'' Project funded by the Volkswagen foundation, with the goal of describing word stress, the intonation contours for different sentence types such as questions and commands, and the interaction of intonation and other markers of information structure such as special particles and word order.
Dorothea Hoffmann is also enrolled with a PhD project on an aspect the Australian language Jaminjung. This is a description of the range of strategies available for the description of motion and travel and their interdependence with cultural factors. Motion descriptions in Jaminjung will also be compared with those in Kriol, the main community language today. For example, an interesting feature of Jaminjung which is also employed by Kriol speakers in these speech communities is the existence of a drainage-based ('upstream', 'downstream') absolute frame of reference.
Mercy Akrofi Ansah is a final-year PGR student who is writing a first grammar of LEtE, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana. Areas of particular interest are the question of word class distinctions, a tense-aspect system which partly relies on tonal marking alone, serial verb constructions, and the marking of interrogative clauses.
In previous positions, I have supervised or co-supervised research dissertations on the PhD and MA level on topics such as spatial expressions, tense and aspect, word classes, Austrian sign language, Romani linguistics, causativity, grammaticalisation, and complex predication.
Publications
View a full list of publications.
Professional biography
I received my undergraduate training in Linguistics at the Universities of Cologne and Edinburgh, and graduated in 1992 with an MA in Linguistics, Phonetics and Musicology from the University of Cologne. From 1992 to 1994 I was employed in a project on comparative reference grammars at the University of Bielefeld. In 1995 I was granted a PhD scholarship at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, for a PhD thesis on the syntax and semantics of classificatory verbs in the Australian language Jaminjung, which I defended in 2000 at the University of Nijmegen. Work on the grammatical and semantic description of Jaminjung in its multilingual context continues to be one of my major research interests. Between 1993 and 2008 I have conducted 11 field trips, funded by various bodies including the Max Planck Society, the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies (AIATSIS) and the Volkswagen Foundation.
Between 1999 and 2001 I conducted postdoctoral research on the typology of secondary predication together with Nikolaus Himmelmann at the University of Bochum, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In 2002 and 2003 I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, focussing in my research on language contact phenomena in Northern Australia. From September 2003 until July 2004 I was employed as a Lecturer in Language Documentation and Description in the Endangered Languages Academic Programme at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. In August 2004 I took up a position of Professor in Linguistics at the University of Graz. In April 2007, I joined the discipline of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester.
I am a member of the Australian Linguistic Society and the Association for Linguistic Typology, and have served for several years as a committee member and newsletter co-editor of the Society for Endangered Languages (''Gesellschaft für bedrohte Sprachen'', GBS).
Teaching Areas
I have taught classes in the areas of linguistic typology, introduction to morphosyntactic analysis, lexical semantics, cognitive linguistics, language contact, structure of Australian languages, field methods, and documentary linguistics, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
- List of Professor Eva Schultze-Berndt's Publications (PDF, 69 KB)