Research projects

Ongoing projects


Number marking in South American languages on the move: How number marking spreads from verbs to nouns (NumVerNoSa)

This project investigates the grammatical category of verbal number, and seeks to account for the mechanism of language change through which number marking spreads from the verbal to the nominal domain, using South American languages as a testbed.

 

Documentation and description of Harakmbut

This project involves the documentation and description of Harakmbut, an underdescribed language from the Peruvian Amazon, spoken in the departamentos of Madre de Dios and Cusco. The linguistic description has so far been based on audio recordings made in the native communities of Puerto Luz, San José del Karene and Shintuya, all with native speakers of the Arakmbut/Amarakaeri variety. The description also feeds back into didactic materials used in intercultural education programmes set up by the Peruvian government.


Argument marking in the Amazonian languages of the Guaporé-Mamoré region

This project focuses on the morphological and syntactic properties of subjects and objects in Differential Argument Marking configurations in the languages spoken in the Guaporé-Mamoré region, in southen Amazonia. The goal is both to deepen our knowledge of the grammatical landscape in the highly diverse and endangered indigenous languages spoken in theis region, and to throw light on the linguistic convergence across the language families in the area---which can provide us with linguistic evidence for the history and patterns of contact among the Guaporé- Mamoré indigenous communities before the onset of European colonization.