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.

Martin Alldrick

Martin Alldrick

Martin Alldrick is a doctoral candidate at the Surrey Morphology Group. He is interested in morphological variation with a particular focus on Slavonic languages. His thesis uses computational models to investigate the processes affecting the resolution or maintenance of overabundant paradigmatic cells in Slovak. 

Dr Cormac Anderson

Dr Cormac Anderson

Dr Cormac Anderson researches the typological diversity and evolutionary dynamics of phonological patterns and the ways in which phonology and morphology interact in synchronic grammars. He has also worked on lexical typology and on tools and methodologies for cross-linguistic comparison. He is a specialist in the Irish language

Prof Matthew Baerman

Prof Matthew Baerman

Prof 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 Sacha Beniamine

Dr Sacha Beniamine

Dr Sacha Beniamine is a British Academy Newton International Fellow. Starting from large inflected lexicons, his project aims to write computational tools to segment inflected words and study variation in exponence across languages using quantitative Canonical Typology. His research interests include inflection classes, morpho-phonology and language change.

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 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 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.

Dr Dávid Győrfi

Dr Dávid Győrfi

Dr Dávid Győrfi is a specialist in Turkic languages and Tense-Aspect-Modality expressions. He is researching the evolution of co-headed verb systems across the world, with an emphasis on Turkic, Dravidian, and Non-Pama-Nyungan languages, within the Leverhulme-funded project entitled “Analogical growth of grammatical systems”.

 

John Hutchinson

John Hutchinson

John Hutchinson is a PhD student investigating patterns of change in morphological paradigms, with a particular focus on the coalescence of multiple independent words into single forms. He has a background in typological, phonological and historical linguistics and is particularly interested in approaching issues in morphology from these perspectives

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.

Dr Alexander Krasovitsky

Dr Alexander Krasovitsky

Dr Krasovitsky's research interests are in the following areas:

Russian linguistics
Language variation and change
Russian and South Slavonic morphosyntax
Phonology and phonetics
Contact linguistics
Corpus studies
Field linguistics

Dr Masha Kyuseva

Dr Masha Kyuseva

Dr Maria (Masha) Kyuseva’s research interests lie in the domains of lexical and morphological typology. Her current project explores patterns of case marking in the dialects of eastern Serbia and western Bulgaria. Dr Kyuseva previously worked on signs denoting size and shape of objects in Russian Sign Language, on computational applications in lexical typology, and on locative predication in North-West Caucasian languages (Adyghe and Kabardian).

Lisa Mack

Lisa Mack

Lisa Mack 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".

Prof Erich Round

Prof Erich Round

Prof Erich Round is the leader of the Surrey Morphology Group. He is a British Academy Global Professor. He is an expert in the languages of Australia and the evolutionary modelling of grammatical features of language. His current research develops models of the evolution of morphological paradigms and promotes the demystification of mathematical modelling in historical linguistics.

Dr Helen Sims-Williams

Dr Helen Sims-Williams

Dr Helen Sims-Williams’ research investigates the dynamics of morphological change. Her current project aims to produce a statistical model of analogical change in inflectional morphology. Previously she has worked on the typology of inflection loss, computational modelling of the evolution of linguistic complexity, and on morphological change in Greek. 

Jurriaan Wiegertjes

Jurriaan Wiegertjes

Jurriaan Wiegertjes is a PhD student investigating systems nominal categorization in Northwest Amazonian languages. His main research interests are in linguistic description, areal typology and diachrony, and he approaches grammatical phenomena from these perspectives. He has experience with agreement, serial verbs and Tukanoan linguistics. He also works on Bará-Váímajã for which he was awarded an ELDP-MPI Glottobank fieldwork grant (GLB0016).

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