Dr. Martina Faller
Lecturer in Linguistics
Address: Room NG.08, Samuel Alexander Building
Phone: +44 (0) 161 275-3191
email: m.faller@manchester.ac.uk
Personal webpage: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/martina.t.faller/
Office hours: Tue 12:00-13:00 and Fri 12:00-13:00
Research specialisation
- (Formal) semantics and pragmatics and their interface
- Quechua linguistics
My general theoretical research areas are (formal) semantics and pragmatics, and I'm particularly interested in cross-linguistic variation. I contribute to the still young but growing field of cross-linguistic semantics/pragmatics by studying a number of issues in Quechua, a language spoken in the Andes, including evidentiality, modality, and quantification. I regularly carry out fieldwork in and around Cusco, Peru.
I would be happy to supervise research projects in different areas of semantics and pragmatics, especially (but not necessarily) from a cross-linguistic point of view, as well as (fieldwork-based) descriptive or typologically oriented projects in the area of morphosyntax. (Note: by pragmatics I mean the pragmatics in the philosophy of language tradition such as speech act theory or (neo)-Gricean theories of implicature. I have no expertise in inter-cultural communication or sociolinguistics.)
Research students
Oliver Bond (graduated 2006, co-supervised with Prof. Kersti Börjars)
Aspects of Eleme verbal morpho-syntax
The Eleme (Ogonoid, Benue-Congo) language of the Niger Delta exhibits a range of morphosyntactic phenomena which are both typologically unusual and structurally diverse. This descriptive investigation into the verbal morpho-syntax of the language discusses fieldwork data from a functional-typological perspective. Particular attention is paid to the domains of verbal negation and participant reference, including applicative morphology and bound logophoric pronouns.
Publications
For an up-to-date list of my publications please visit my personal webpage
Professional biography
- Lecturer in Linguistics, 2003 - present
- Visiting postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, 2002 - 2003
- PhD in Linguistics, Stanford University, 2002
- Visiting researcher at the Center for Machine Translation, Carnegie Mellon University, 1994-1995
- MSc in Speech and Language Processing, University of Edinburgh, 1994
- Diplom (equivalent to MA) in Technical Translation, University of Hildesheim, 1993
- Member of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, the Philological Society, and the Gesellschaft für Semantik
- Member of the Editorial Board for the online journal Semantics and Pragmatics
- Reviewer of grant proposals to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the National Science Foundation (NSF), USA, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada
- Reviewer of article submissions to the Journal of Semantics, Linguistics and Philosophy, Natural Language Semantics, Linguistics, Pragmatics, the International Journal of American Linguistics, and the Linguistic Review
Teaching Areas
Semantics, Typology, Linguistic Field Methods