Sonia Cristofaro is a linguist at Sorbonne University who specializes in linguistic typology and subordination. [1]
Cristofaro studied for an MA in linguistics at the University of Pavia, graduating in 1993. After periods studying at the University of Manchester and the Free University of Berlin, she returned to Pavia for her doctorate, awarded in 1998. [2]
In 1999 Cristofaro left Pavia to take up a position as assistant professor at the University of Verona, but shortly after returned to Pavia as associate professor, where she remained until 2020. She is currently full professor of linguistics in the Faculty of Letters at the Sorbonne University. [2] [3]
In 2021 Cristofaro was elected ordinary member of the Academia Europaea. [1]
Cristofaro is well known for her work on linguistic subordination; her 2003 monograph on the topic has been cited over a thousand times. [4] In the volume, Cristofaro departs from traditional approaches by adopting a non-structural definition of subordination, characterized in terms of a cognitive asymmetry between two states of affairs; she also establishes a number of implicational hierarchies for subordination types. [5]
Cristofaro's work takes a functionalist perspective on linguistic typology. Her more recent work has focused on the extent to which linguistic universals and typological generalizations can be explained diachronically, in terms of common patterns of language change such as grammaticalization. [1] [6] [7]
Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).
The Munda languages are a group of closely related languages spoken by about nine million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal. Historically, they have been called the Kolarian languages. They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic language family, which means they are more distantly related to languages such as the Mon and Khmer languages, to Vietnamese, as well as to minority languages in Thailand and Laos and the minority Mangic languages of South China. Bhumij, Ho, Mundari, and Santali are notable Munda languages.
In theoretical linguistics, a converb is a nonfinite verb form that serves to express adverbial subordination: notions like 'when', 'because', 'after' and 'while'. Other terms that have been used to refer to converbs include adverbial participle, conjunctive participle, gerund, gerundive and verbal adverb.
Johanna Nichols is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Torricelli languages are a family of about fifty languages of the northern Papua New Guinea coast, spoken by about 80,000 people. They are named after the Torricelli Mountains. The most populous and best known Torricelli language is Arapesh, with about 30,000 speakers.
The South Bougainville or East Bougainville languages are a small language family spoken on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. They were classified as East Papuan languages by Stephen Wurm, but this does not now seem tenable, and was abandoned in Ethnologue (2009).
Edward J. Vajda is a historical linguist at Western Washington University, Washington.
Martin Haspelmath is a German linguist working in the field of linguistic typology. He is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he worked from 1998 to 2015 and again since 2020. Between 2015 and 2020, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. He is also an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Leipzig.
The Senegambian languages, traditionally known as the Northern West Atlantic, or in more recent literature sometimes confusingly as the Atlantic languages, are a branch of Atlantic–Congo languages centered on Senegal, with most languages spoken there and in neighboring southern Mauritania, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea. The transhumant Fula, however, have spread with their languages from Senegal across the western and central Sahel. The most populous unitary language is Wolof, the national language of Senegal, with four million native speakers and millions more second-language users. There are perhaps 13 million speakers of the various varieties of Fula, and over a million speakers of Serer. The most prominent feature of the Senegambian languages is that they are devoid of tone, unlike the vast majority of Atlantic-Congo languages.
Anna Siewierska was a Polish-born linguist who worked in Australia, Poland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. She was professor of linguistics at Department of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster University and a leading specialist in language typology.
Language complexity is a topic in linguistics which can be divided into several sub-topics such as phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic complexity. The subject also carries importance for language evolution.
Fernando Zúñiga is a Chilean-born Swiss linguist at the University of Bern, where he held the chair of General Linguistics from February, 2013 until January, 2024; after retiring for health reasons, he became an associate researcher at the Institute of Linguistics. He works in the fields of linguistic typology and indigenous languages of the Americas, especially Mapudungun and Algonquian languages.
Mary Dalrymple is a British linguist who is professor of syntax at Oxford University. At Oxford, she is a fellow of Linacre College. Prior to that she was a lecturer in linguistics at King's College London, a senior member of the research staff at the Palo Alto Research Center in the Natural Language Theory and Technology group and a computer scientist at SRI International.
Susanne Maria Michaelis is a specialist in creole linguistics who is affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. She was previously at Leipzig University and at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena.
The usage-based linguistics is a linguistics approach within a broader functional/cognitive framework, that emerged since the late 1980s, and that assumes a profound relation between linguistic structure and usage. It challenges the dominant focus, in 20th century linguistics, on considering language as an isolated system removed from its use in human interaction and human cognition. Rather, usage-based models posit that linguistic information is expressed via context-sensitive mental processing and mental representations, which have the cognitive ability to succinctly account for the complexity of actual language use at all levels. Broadly speaking, a usage-based model of language accounts for language acquisition and processing, synchronic and diachronic patterns, and both low-level and high-level structure in language, by looking at actual language use.
Ekkehard König is a German linguist and Professor Emeritus at the Free University of Berlin, specializing in linguistic typology, semantics, and the linguistics of English.
Ulrike Zeshan is a German-born linguist and academic specializing in the linguistics of signed languages. She is Professor of Sign Language Linguistics at the University of Central Lancashire, UK.
Isabelle Bril is a senior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and a member of LACITO specializing in morphosyntax, semantics, typology, and Austronesian languages.
Hilary Chappell is a professor of linguistics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. Her research focuses on grammaticalization and the typology of the Sinitic languages.
Michael Daniel is a linguist from Russia specializing in linguistic typology and the study of languages of Dagestan (Russia).