Staff & Students

People

Members of the Surrey Morphology Group collaborate with researchers from institutions in every continent and work closely with a network of visiting academics with whom we have longstanding international research links.

Dr Matthew Baerman

Dr Matthew Baerman

Dr Matthew Baerman is a specialist in inflectional morphology whose research involves a combination of cross-linguistic surveys, detailed case studies, computational modelling and diachronic reconstruction. His recent work explores morphologically-defined structures both within the paradigm (e.g. syncretism and stem alternations) and across groups of words (e.g. inflection classes).

Dr Oliver Bond

Dr Oliver Bond

Dr Oliver Bond researches the ways in which variation can form the empirical base for developing linguistic theory. His theoretical work primarily concerns how the various components of grammar interface, with a focus on the relationship between morphology, syntax and the lexicon. His language expertise include the Eleme language of Rivers State, Nigeria and the Tamangic languages spoken in Manang District, Nepal.

Dr Nadežda Christopher

Dr Nadežda Christopher

Dr Nadežda Christopher is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow working on morpho-syntactic micro-variation and its relation with mutual intelligibility between three Turkic languages of Central Asia – Kazakh, Uzbek, Karakalpak. Nadezda’s previous work includes fieldwork in Kazakhstan, research on the Kazakh information structure, Russian negation and negative polarity items.

Dr Marina Chumakina

Dr Marina Chumakina

Dr Marina Chumakina is an expert in Archi, a Nakh-Daghestanian language spoken in the Caucusus. Her recent research focuses on the challenges that Archi morphosyntax poses for theoretical models of syntax, specifically to what extent the existing infrastructures of HPSG, LFG and Minimalism can adequately account for the highly complex agreement system present in the language.

Prof Greville G. Corbett

Prof Greville G. Corbett

Prof Greville G. Corbett is the leader of the Surrey Morphology Group. He is best known for his research on grammatical gender, number, agreement and colour terms as well as typological studies into various aspects of morphology including periphrasis, deponency and defectiveness. He is a major proponent of Network Morphology, founder of Canonical Typology and an expert in Slavonic languages.

Penny Everson

Penny Everson

Penny Everson supports the work of the Surrey Morphology Group on a range of grants including the AHRC funded project "External agreement" and the ESRC funded project "Optimal Categorisation".

Dr Timothy Feist

Dr Timothy Feist

Dr Timothy Feist researches the role gender and classifiers play in the tracking of referents across discourse. He previously worked on Oto-Manguean inflectional class distinctions, which involve highly complex morphological systems involving suffixes, prefixes, stem alternations and complex tonal patterns. He is also a specialist in Skolt Saami, a highly endangered and under-described language spoken in the far northeast of Finland.

Dr Michael Franjieh

Dr Michael Franjieh

Dr. Michael Franjieh is a specialist in Oceanic languages. He is currently researching the emergence of grammatical gender from possessive classifier systems in Oceanic from a psycholinguistic perspective as part of the ESRC funded project Optimal Categorisation.

Dávid Győrfi

Dávid Győrfi

Dávid Győrfi is a PhD student researching verbal morphosyntax across languages, with a special focus on Kypchak Turkic (e.g. Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar). He is mainly interested in verb+verb and especially, converbial and auxiliary constructions from the point of view of Canonical Typology and other formal theories.

 

Borja Herce

Borja Herce

Borja Herce is a PhD student working on autonomous morphological structures (i.e. morphomes). His focus is on inflection and on the relationtionship of form to morphosyntactic functions. His research interests also include corpus linguistics and language change, always from a cross-linguistic perspective.

 

Dr Steven Kaye

Dr Steven Kaye

Dr Steven Kaye is researching the behaviour of Nakh-Daghestanian ‘external agreement’, a phenomenon which is typologically unusual but extremely widespread in this family. He has previously worked on the Iranian language Northern Talyshi (Azerbaijan) and on grammaticalization and non-canonical verb morphology in Italic/Romance.

Lisa Mack

Lisa Mack

Lisa Mack supports the work of the Surrey Morphology Group on a range of projects including the the AHRC/ESRC funded project "Endangered complexity: inflectional classes in Oto-Manguean languages" and the AHRC funded project "From competing theories to fieldwork: the challenge of an extreme agreement system".

Dr Jérémy Pasquereau

Dr Jérémy Pasquereau

Dr Jérémy Pasquereau is researching the relationship between event number and participant number in Seri, a language isolate spoken in Mexico. His previous work includes fieldwork on Karata (Nakh-Daghestanian) and research on polar response particles in French.

Dr Tatiana Reid

Dr Tatiana Reid

Dr Tatiana Reid's recent research focusses on the morphology and phonology of verbs in the Luo variety of Nuer. Her work examines the vast range of phonological distinctions employed in the language, including three contrastive vowel lengths, tone and phonation distinctions.

Dr Helen Sims-Williams

Dr Helen Sims-Williams

Dr Helen Sims-Williams is a historical linguist currently researching the loss of inflection from a cross-linguistic perspective. Her research investigates how paradigm structure and usage affect morphological change and explores the implications for morphological theory. She has a particular interest in the history of Greek and languages of the Ancient Near East.

Former members and associated staff

Former Members

Visiting Staff

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