I currently work as principle investigator in the MelaTAMP project (with Manfred Krifka) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Elevator pitch for the MelaTAMP project
Our knowledge about tense, aspect, modality and polarity expressions is crucially based on data from European and typologically similar languages. We know that many languages of Melanesia behave quite differently, but until recently we did not have much empirical data to find out exactly how. In recent years, language documentation projects have produced corpus data for some of those languages. We are exploring those, both individually and comparatively, to get a better understanding of their TAMP systems.
About me
My work aims to bridge language documentation, formal semantics and pragmatics, typology and corpus linguistics. My theoretical interests gravitate towards modality, possession, serial verb constructions and information structure. I am also very much invested in sustainable data management, exploration of small corpora from under-documented languages, methods of elicitation and general reproducibility of linguistic data. I have expertise on and varying degrees of proficiency in Daakaka, Dalkalaen and Bislama (Oceanic), Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Swahili, German (native), English and French.
I live in Berlin, with my philosopher husband, David Löwenstein, and our son Leonhard.