International Summer School on
Language Documentation and Description

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Leiden

5 July - 17 July 2010

Instructors

The summer school will draw upon the extensive expertise of staff members at the three organizing universities in the 3L Consortium: University of Lyon, Leiden University and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, as well as instructors from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, University of Manitoba, University of Texas, Naples "l'Orientale" University, University of Libreville (Gabon).

Short biographies of all summer school instructors are listed below. Please explore the links provided for additional information on instructors' research interests, institutions, and other academic and teaching experience.

Heriberto Avelino

Margot van den Berg

Margot van den Berg studied Linguistics at the Radboud University of Nijmegen and defended her PhD dissertation on Early Sranan at the University of Amsterdam in 2007. In January of 2009, she was awarded a NWO VENI scholarship for her project 'Creoles at birth?'. In this project, she studies the relationships between creole formation, multilingual language use and processes of codeswitching and borrowing through a combination of diachronic research on the creole languages Sranan (Suriname) and Negerhollands (Virgin Islands) and contemporary field research on multilingual language use in Ghana, Togo and the Bijlmer (Netherlands). She is further the coordinator of the Suriname section within the Languages in Contact group (Radboud University of Nijmegen), and of the Suriname Creole Archive (SUCA).

René van den Berg

René van den Berg is a linguistics consultant with SIL International based in Papua New Guinea. He completed a grammar and two dictionaries of the Muna language (Sulawesi, Indonesia), and wrote on descriptive and comparative topics in the languages of Sulawesi and Western Oceania. His interests are descriptive linguistics, comparative Austronesian linguistics and lexicography.

Oliver Bond

Oliver Bond is a postdoctoral fellow in the Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP), Department of Linguistics at SOAS. His principal research interests lie in typology, historical linguistics and language documentation, including fieldwork on Eleme (Ogonoid, Benue-Congo), an under-described language spoken in southeast Nigeria. Oliver's current research project, entitled NegTyp, aims to contribute to a broader understanding of the properties of negation in language.

Denis Creissels

Diana Forker

Diana Forker studied Philosophy, Logics and Linguistics at the universities of Pisa, Moscow and Leipzig. She finished her M.A. in 2007 with a thesis on “Tense and Aspect in Bezhta”. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation under the supervision of Prof. B. Comrie. The research focuses on a grammatical description of Hinuq, spoken in Daghestan. Her other research interests include Tsezic languages, typology, philosophy of language and semantics.

Antoine Guillaume

Antoine Guillaume is researcher at the laboratory Dynamique du Langage (DDL) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientique (CNRS) and the University of Lyon (France). He earned his doctorate at La Trobe University (2004). His main interests are the documentation and description of the endangered and poorly studied languages of the Tacanan family from Amazonian Bolivia and Peru. He has conducted extensive fieldwork on three languages of this family: Cavineña, Reyesano and Tacana. His main publications include a comprehensive grammar of Cavineña (2008, Mouton de Gruyter), articles on various morphosyntactic issues in Cavineña and Reyesano (ergativity, hierarchical agreement, double-object constructions, sociative causation, associated motion, etc.), and a (forthcoming) co-edited special issue of IJAL on argument-encoding systems in Bolivian Amazonian languages.

Jean-Marie Hombert

Jean-Marie Hombert holds a degree in computer engineering (INSA, Lyon), and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley. He also has a "doctorat d'état" (doctorate) in linguistics from the University of Provence. From 1991 to 1996, Hombert was Dean of Research at Lyon2 University. He founded and directed the "Dynamique du Language" Laboratory between 1994 and 2004. He has been the French coordinator for the European EUROCORES program "The Origin of Man, Language and Languages" since 2001. Between 2002 and 2005, he was the Director of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). His research covers the fields of phonetics, African languages, historical linguistics and more recently, Language origin and evolution. He recently organized a conference on New Directions in Historical Linguistics.

Marian Klamer

Marian Klamer teaches at Leiden University, and specializes in the study of Austronesian and Papuan languages spoken in Eastern Indonesia. She has done extensive fieldwork on languages of Sumba, East Timor, Alor and Pantar, and currently heads a Eurobabel project on the languages of the latter two islands. Her areas of interest include language description, typology, historical and contact-induced change, and lexical semantics. Major publications include A grammar of Teiwa (Mouton de Gruyter, 2010), A grammar of Kambera (Mouton de Gruyter, 1998) and Typological and Areal Analyses: Contributions from East Nusantara (with co-editor M. Ewing; Pacific Linguistics, 2010).

Constance Kutsch Lojenga

Raymond Mayer

Raymond Mayer is Professor of Anthropology and Ethnomusicology at the University of Libreville (Gabon), where he has been teaching for over thirty years. He is both an Africanist and an Oceanist. Twice on a Fulbright Hays grant at the University of Hawai'i, he worked on recorded data from the Wallis and Futuna Islands (West Polynesia) since 1893, and was a contributor to Garland's Encyclopaedia of Ethnomusicology. In Gabon, his common fields of research are kinship, religion, technologies and music. He made several documentaries on pygmy and nonpygmy groups in collaboration with Gabonese National TV. He is also much involved in institutional partnership between Lyon-2 and Libreville, especially for OMLL, AALLED and LED-TDR projects.

Stuart McGill

Stuart McGill is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Endangered Languages Academic Programme at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He is particularly interested in the documentation and description of the Kainji languages of northwest Nigeria. These are a mix of endangered and relatively robust (and large) languages, which have nonetheless been largely neglected by linguists. His research interests also lie in the interaction between discourse and grammar, typology, technology and language documentation, and phonology.

Maarten Mous

Maarten Mous is Professor of African Linguistics in the Centre of Linguistics, Leiden University. His areas of interest are Tanzania, Ethiopia, West Africa; Cushitic and Bantu; language description; diathesis derivation; and language contact. He regularly teaches courses in field methods, introduction to African Languages and Cultures, Discourse Analysis, and Samples of Linguistic Structure.

Angela Nonaka

Dr. Angela M. Nonaka is a faculty member at the University of Texas (USA). She has lived and worked extensively in Asia studying sign languages in East and Southeast Asia. Her current research focuses on examination of Ban Khor Sign Language, an endangered sign language isolate in Thailand. Reflective of her training in and commitment to holistic four-fields anthropology, her scholarship emphasizes use-based analyses of language in situ, invoking theories and methods associated with various research approaches in contemporary linguistic anthropology. Her recent publications on language endangerment include: “Sign Languages-The Forgotten Endangered Languages: Lessons on the Importance of Remembering” and “Estimating Size, Scope, and Membership of the Speech/Sign Communities of Undocumented Indigenous/Village Sign Languages: The Ban Khor Case Study.

Sebastian Nordhoff

Victoria Nyst

Victoria Nyst is a post-doctoral fellow in the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. Her main research interests are in sign language endangerment, documentation and description, and community based field linguistics, with a specialism in Adamorobe Sign Language (from Ghana) and the sign languages of West Africa.

Pascale Paulin

Tyler Peterson

Tyler Peterson is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. His primary empirical interest is in the documentation and research of the Tsimshianic languages. He also works on the formal semantics and pragmatics of modality and evidentiality. Other interests include computational linguistics, and the maintenance and revitalization of endangered languages.

Julia Sallabank

Julia Sallabank is a research fellow in language support and revitalisation in the Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP), Department of Linguistics at SOAS. Julia's research interests are primarily sociolinguistic, with a focus on the endangered Norman French speaking community in Guernsey, Channel Islands. She is interested in language revitalisation, language ideology, literacy practices in endangered languages, and their implications for language policy.

Thilo Schadeberg

Thilo Schadeberg is professor emeritus of African languages at Leiden University. He has carried out field work in Sudan, Tanzania, Angola and Mozambique, and conducted historical comparative research on Bantu languages and on Kordofanian.

Rachel Selbach

Rachel Selbach studied linguistics in Montreal, Canada at Concordia University, l'Universite de Montreal and McGill. Her research there focused on current sociolinguistic aspects of Solomon Islands Pijin. Moving to Amsterdam and back to the old world, her investigation of pidgins and creoles took on deeper historical dimensions with her investigation of the Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean. She is currently in the process of completing her doctoral dissertation on the Lingua Franca, now as a guest researcher at the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Lolke Van der Veen

Lolke Van der Veen is Professor of Linguistics in Lyon. Descriptive and historical linguistics are his main interests. He is a specialist of the Bantu languages of Gabon, the co-author of a scholarly dictionary of a nearly extinct language, and the main correspondent of the Sorosoro project (Chirac Foundation) whose objective is the documentation of Gabonese languages.

Søren Wichmann

Søren Wichmann is a Senior Scientist that the Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Archaeology, University of Leiden. His research interests include historical and descriptive linguistics. Work in the latter area has concentrated on languages of Mesoamerica.

Erin Wilkinson

Erin Wilkinson is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at University of Manitoba and the first Deaf professor of linguistics in Canada. Her research interests are in cognitive-functional linguistics, corpora linguistics, typology, and documentation of signed languages. Her most recent work examined kinship terminologies of forty signed languages' kinship terminologies, contributing to a better understanding about typological variation in visual-gestural languages.

Kofi Yakpo

Kofi Yakpo received a Magister Artium in linguistics, social anthropology and political science from the University of Cologne with a master's thesis on Bislama, the Creole language of Vanuatu. He earned his PhD in linguistics from the University of Nijmegen for his description of Pichi, a Creole language of Equatorial Guinea. His professional path includes heading the Africa desk of FIAN, an international human rights organisation and serving as a policy advisor with the German Parliament in Berlin. Kofi Yakpo is presently working as a post-doctoral researcher in the team of Pieter Muysken at the University of Nijmegen in a project on language contact and historical linguistics.