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Distributional Linguistics Lab
NCCR Evolving Language
I got my graduate training in the Cognitive Anthropology Group at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and received my Ph.D. degree in 1997 from the University of Zürich. From 1995 through 1998 I taught part-time in Zürich and worked as a researcher at the University of Mainz. I then spent three years at the University of California, Berkeley, on a postdoctoral fellowship sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2001 I completed my Habilitation at Zürich and was awarded an extracurricular professorship (Förderungsprofessur) by the Swiss National Science Foundation. From 2002 until 2011, I was professor of linguistic typology and variation at the University of Leipzig (Institute of Linguistics), and in 2011 I took over the chair of general linguistics at the University of Zürich. Since 2020 I am director of the research center NCCR Evolving Language.
My core research question is what's where why in language. I want to uncover the conditions that shape the spatio-temporal dynamics of language, and I seek to understand their nature in the light of human evolution.
| 2021 | MPI-SSH Summer School: Doorway to Human History, Jena |
| 2021 | 5th Usage-Based Linguistic Conference, Tel Aviv |
| 2019 |
1st ACL Workshop on Typology for Polyglot NLP, Florence |
| 2019 | Lexical Splits. Surrey. |
| 2018 |
III Colloquio internacional sobre la tipología de las lenguas amerindias, Lima |
| 2018 |
Typology and Universals in Word Formation IV, Košice |
| 2017 |
Cognitive Explanations in Linguistic Typology, Canberra |
| 2017 |
50th Anniversary Meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society, Sydney |
| 2017 |
Phylogenetic Methods in Historical Linguistics 2, Tübingen |
| 2015 | Lorentz Center International Scientific Workshop: Capturing Phylogenetic Algorithms for Linguistics, Leiden |
| 2015 | 48th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, Santa Barbara |
| 2015 | Perspectives on Nativism, Edinburgh |
| 2015 | 1st Conference on Causality in the Language Sciences, Leipzig |
| 2014 | 36th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society, Marburg |
| 2014 | 2nd International South Asia Workshop, Uppsala |
| 2013 | Language Documentation: Past – Present – Future, Hannover |
A full CV is available on request.
