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About me
I got interested in Linguistics while I was on secondary school and chose to study it at UvA. After I got my BA and rMA degrees, I started working as a PhD in the department of Theoretical Linguistics. A description of my research can be found below.
What I like so much about languages is that they are so different from each other . Every language is used to express meaning, but every language has its own way of doing so. For instance in English one says 'I have a book', while in Egyptian Arabic the literal equivalent would be 'On me book'. Why is that? Typological research makes it possible to study such differences.
My other main interest is linguistic theory. Especially functionalist theory gives me the tools to study why it is that languages differ from each other and yet are so succesful in expressing meaning.
About my project
Transparency is defined as a consistent one-to-one relation between meaning and form. I work with the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar, which distinguishes four levels of linguistic organisation. Applied to this framework, a transparent relation is a one-to-one relation between pragmatic and semantic units at the one hand, and morphosyntactic and phonological units at the other. Transparency is violated by operations like redundancy, where two forms relate to one meaning, and fusional morphology, where two meanings relate to one form.
Non-transparent (or: opaque) structures appear in the vast majority of languages; only few languages are completely transparent. Apparently opacity has an advantage. My study aims to find out why opacity exists in language.
Creole languages are typically more transparent than non-creoles (cf. my MA-thesis below). Furthermore, early child language is more transparent than adult language (cf. Slobin 1977 below). These findings indicates that language starts out transparently and develops opacity later on. In this project, transparency is believed to be prior to opacity.
My research involves a typological study on a sample of twenty-five languages. I will establish which non-transparent properties exist in these languages. The languages will then be compared, which results in an implicational hierarchy ordering features on a transparency scale. This ordering can then be interpreted as a diachronic pathway: languages acquire opaque features in this order.
When we know where opacification starts, we can answer the question why it takes place. Presumably, redundancy is the consequence of the need to be extremely salient in order to avoid loss of information, while fusion allows for being economical.
Slobin 1977