Dr. Nikolett Mus

I am currently a research fellow at the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics in Budapest. My main research focus is on the syntax of Tundra Nenets, an endangered indigenous Siberian language that belongs to the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic language family. I specialized, in particular, in the syntax of various interrogative constructions in Tundra Nenets.

At present, I lead a research project that aims at describing, analysing and comparing the syntax and prosody of interrogative constructions in two (sub)dialects of Tundra Nenets.

In addition, I investigate the structure of nonverbal predicate constructions as well as factors and stages of a SOV > SVO, or more precisely an SOV > SVX(*) syntatic change attested in languages spoken in Northern Siberia.

Besides, I deal with the syntactic structure of Csángó (a dialect of Hungarian spoken in the Romanian region of Moldavia).

Additionally, my research interest covers the documentation and preservation of endangered languages, as well as the methods of corpus building and experimental syntactic fieldwork.