OCSEAN – Oceanic and South East Asian Navigators, European Commission Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie RISE grant, Project Number 873207: OCSEAN; http://www.wordsandbones.uni-tuebingen.de/ocsean/
Past Projects
Reconstructing the past through languages of the present: The Lesser Sunda Islands (2014 - 2019)
NIAS Theme group (2015) Capturing Phylogenetic Algorithms for Linguistics (5 fellows, 3 months). Co-applicant Harald Hammarström.
Grammar Matrix Reloaded (2014-2017)
Syntax and Semantics of Affectedness (2014-2017). Principal Investigator: František Kratochvíl (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore). Bringing the fields of grammar engineering and language description closer together
Language Archive of Insular South East Asia and West New Guinea (LAISEANG) (2013-2014)
- Alor-Pantar languages: Origins and theoretical impact (2009-2013)
• EuroBABEL Collaborative Research Project (a EUROCORES program) • Principal Investigator: Marian Klamer, Collaborative senior researchers: Gary Holton (University of Hawaii), Greville Corbett (University of Surrey, head of the Surrey Morphology Group), Dunstan Brown (University of York); Postdoctoral researchers: Sebastian Fedden,Laura Robinson, Antoinette Schapper This research project aimed to further document and analyse the non-Austronesian languages of several islands of the Alor-Pantar region in southeastern Indonesia. Until very recently, these endangered languages were among the least documented languages of Indonesia. The project focused on: (1) Extended documentation of spatial reference and numerical expressions. (2) Word Class Typology: the continuum between word classes and grammatical features; how morpho-syntactic categories evolve; unusual morpho-syntactic phenomena of the Alor-Pantar languages. (3) Linguistic Prehistory: quantitative evidence for the genetic position of the Alor-Pantar languages, based on a bottom-up reconstruction to establish genetic subgroups and evaluate potential genetic relationships with languages of New Guinea.
Melanesian languages on the edge of Asia: past, present and future (8-12 February 2010, Manokwari, Papua)
• Australia-Netherlands Research Collaboration (ANRC) Workshop Grant (2009) • Academic leaders: - Nicholas Evans(Australian National University), Marian Klamer, Wayan Arka (Australian National University / Universitas Udayana, Indonesia) This workshop focussed on the most linguistically diverse part of the world – Melanesia – which contains around a fifth of the world's 6000 languages in under 3% of its land area and less than 0.2% of its population. These languages are astonishingly diverse, barely known to science, and face the threat of extinction without trace in the coming century unless concerted international efforts are made to meet the huge challenge of documenting them. At the same time, the theoretical recognition of cultural and linguistic rights of minority groups in Indonesia, Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea faces enormous practical difficulties if it is to be realised, as national governments have indicated they wish, as education programs that allow children to receive part of their schooling in their mother-tongue. Further information: workshop website project summary at the ANRC 2009 workshops page
Characterizing Humn Language by Structural Complexity (CHLaSC) (2008-2010) • Collaborative Research Project funded by the European Commission • Conducted by: - Uli Sauerland (Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Berlin) - Bart Hollebrandse (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) This research project investigated the structural complexity of human language and its significance for human nature. The possible relations between the ability to generate embedded structures and the cognitive ability of ascribing beliefs to others (i.e., Theory of Mind) made up the focus of the project. Further information: research project summary page at ZAS
Linguistic Variation in Eastern Indonesia: The Alor and Pantar project (2002-2008) • Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Vernieuwingsimpuls (VIDI) Research Grant • PI: Marian Klamer, postdoc Louise Baird, Ph student František Kratochvíl The research in this project concerned an initial survey of the linguistic situation on the islands of Alor and Pantar in southeastern Indonesia, as well as in-depth description of four languages spoken in this region: Abui, Teiwa, Alorese and Klon. In this project we combined the urgent need to document these languages with a comparative and theoretical analysis of a specific set of their structural characteristics. The cross-linguistic comparisons have a genetic, areal, as well as a typological angle. Further information: research project summary at LIAS
Documentation of Klon, Abui, and Teiwa (2004) • The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (HRELP), SOAS, London • Main applicant: Louise Baird The primary aim of the fieldwork for this project was to collect more language data for Klon, Abui and Teiwa to add to the body of data collected in 2003 by during the Linguistic Variation in Eastern Indonesia project. Results of this project included short grammars of Klon and Teiwa and a full reference grammar of Abui, trilingual dictionaries (local language – Indonesian – English) and a collection of texts published locally for each language using both the national Indonesian language and English. Further information: project summary at HRELP Endangered Language Archive (ELA)
Grammaticalization in languages of Eastern Indonesia (1996-1999)
• Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Royal Academy Fellowship The goal of this project was to investigate the historical development of functional elements in the Austronesian (Central-Malayo-Polynesian, CMP) languages in eastern Indonesia, focussing in particular on Kambera. Functional items may develop out of lexical items through processes of morpho-syntactic and semantic generalisation and phonological weakening. Such processes of change are commonly referred to as ‘grammaticalization’. In the study of grammaticalization in CMP-languages the following questions were addressed: (1) Which types of semantic, morpho-syntactic and phonological changes do lexical elements undergo in the process of grammaticalization? (2) What are the conditions for grammaticalization to take place (optionally or obligatorily)? (3) How do we account for lexemes that are phonologically identical and derive from the same ancestor, but have different morpho-syntactic categories in the grammar of a language as spoken today? (4) More generally: does synchronic grammar only contain words belonging to discrete categories, or can words belong to more than one category at the time? Results of the project included articles on the grammaticalization of report verbs into complementizers (e.g., Lingua 2000), the synchronic and diachronic analysis of clitic clusters (e.g., Linguistics 1997), the development of phrasal emotion predicates (e.g., Yearbook of Morphology 2000), an account of multi-categorial items in synchronic grammar (e.g., Klamer 2004 in Fischer, Norde and Perridon (eds.)), and an article on the non-arbitrary form of expressives (Language 2002).
The morphology of Kambera (1990-1994)
• Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) • Personal Grant, Individual PhD Research Project The primary aim of this project was to document and describe the Kambera language in detail. This involved 18 months of fieldwork on the island of Sumba in southeastern Indonesia. The result of this project was a PhD dissertation, 'Kambera: a language of Eastern Indonesia', withGeert Booij and Wim Stokhof as supervisors. This dissertation was nominated by the Dutch Linguistic Society among the top three linguistic dissertations defended at a Dutch university in 1994 ('AVT Dissertation Award') and was published in Mouton Grammar Library as Klamer (1998)