Dr Birgit Hellwig

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (ELDP)

Birgit Hellwig is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP), where she is working on Goemai, a previously undescribed West Chadic language of Central Nigeria. She is currently writing a reference grammar and dictionary of that language, and compiling an annotated text corpus. In 2003-4 she has also been a member of ELAP teaching staff on the Fieldmethods course.

Birgit has studied African languages, general linguistics and anthropology at the University of Bayreuth (Germany), at University College, London, and the University of Hamburg (Germany). She did her PhD in linguistics at the University of Nijmegen (The Netherlands). She has been working on Chadic languages since 1998; her MA thesis focused on language contact between Chadic and Benue Congo languages; and her PhD thesis investigated in detail the grammatical, semantic and pragmatic aspects of how postural information is coded in one Chadic language (Goemai).

Her main research interests lie in lexical semantics, in the relationship between language and cognition, and in various aspects of language documentation, in particular: field methodology, the integration of semantics into grammar writing, and in the technological side of documentation.

Publications:

In prep. The coding of posture in nominal classifier systems. In Andrea C. Schalley and Dietmar Zaefferer (eds.) Ontolinguistics. How ontological status shapes the linguistic coding of concepts. The Hague: Mouton (Trends in Linguistics.)

Submitted. Serial verb constructions in Goemai. In Alexander Y. Aikhenvald and R.M.W Dixon (eds.) Serial verb constructions: a cross-linguistic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Submitted: 'To sit face down': Location and position in Goemai. In Felix K.Ameka and Stephen C. Levinson (eds.) Locative predicates. (Linguistics, special issue).

Submitted. 'See this sitting one': Demonstratives and deictic classifiers in Goemai. In Sérgio Meira and Michael Dunn (eds.) Demonstratives in use.

To appear: Field semantics and grammar-writing: Stimuli-based techniques and the study of locative verbs. In Felix Ameka, Alan Dench and Nicholas Evans (eds.) Catching language: Issues in grammar writing. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

2004 A grammatical sketch of Goemai: Word classes. In Gabor Takács (ed.) Egyptian and Semito-Hamitic (Afro-Asiatic) studies in memorium W Vycichl. Leiden and Boston, Brill. 296-341. (Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, 39.)

and Joseph A. McIntyre. 2000. Hausa plural systems: A diachronic presentation. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 21:1-43.

Theses:

1998. Spracwandel durch Sprachkontakt: Möglichkeiten der Rekonstruktion am Beispiel westtschadischer Sprachen. MA thesis, Hamburg: University of Hamburg. ["Language change through language contact: possibilities of reconstruction, exemplified with West Chadic languages."]