Miriam Bouzouita

Miriam Bouzouita is Professor of Romance Linguistics (Focus on Spanish) at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She read her doctoral dissertation at King’s College London, University of London under the supervision of Prof. Dr Ruth Kempson on clitic placement in the history of Spanish using a Dynamic Syntax approach. Her scholarly interests range from Hispanic philology, Ibero-Romance historical linguistics and dialectology to formal linguistics.

She has published on the grammaticalisation of clitic pronouns, Left-Periphery phenomena, future and possessive constructions in Romance from a historical and dialectological perspective. She has headed recently a research project on the grammatical variation in spatial adverbial constructions in the Spanish dialects, and currently a research infrastructure project which explores collaborative game-based approaches to morpho-syntactically annotate and parse the COSER corpus (Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural; Audible Corpus of Rural Oral Spanish; http://www.corpusrural.es/). Together with colleagues from the universities of Lausanne and Montreal, she is leading the Spanish Dialects App project (Dialectos del español; www.dialectosdelespanol.org) to explore current diatopic and sociolinguistic morpho-syntactic variation in the whole Spanish-speaking world using mobile phone applications.

Hannah Gibson

Hannah Gibson is a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Essex. She completed a doctoral thesis entitled Auxiliary placement in Rangi: A Dynamic Syntax perspective at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2012. Prior to joining the University of Essex, she was a postdoctoral researcher Osaka University and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at SOAS University of London.

Her research is primarily concerned with linguistic variation, particularly why and how languages change. Much of her work examines the syntax and semantics of the Bantu languages, with a focus on the languages of East Africa. Her formal work is articulated from the perspective of the Dynamic Syntax theoretical framework. Recent publications include Probing the interaction of language contact and internal innovation: four case studies of morphosyntactic change in Rangi (with Lutz Marten, Studies in African Linguistics, 2019), Building meaning in context: A dynamic approach to Bantu clause structure (Wiley Blackwell, 2018) and A Dynamic Syntax modelling of Japanese and Rangi clefts: parsing incrementality and the growth of interpretation (with Tohru Seraku, Language Sciences, 2016). 

Lutz Marten

Lutz Marten is Professor of General and African Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Languages and Cultures from 2015 to 2018. He is interested in formal linguistics and linguistic theory, comparative and historical linguistics, and questions of language and identity. He has been centrally involved in the development of the syntactic framework of Dynamic Syntax, which explores the role of utterance comprehension for the architecture of grammar. Most of his work focuses on African languages and he has conducted research in Eastern and Southern Africa. He recently completed a 3-year Leverhulme-funded major research project on ‘Morphosyntactic Variation in Bantu: Typology, contact and change’ (2014-18).

His publications include At the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface (OUP 2002), A Grammatical Sketch of Herero (with Wilhelm Möhlig and Jekura Kavari, Köppe 2002), The Dynamics of Language (with Ronnie Cann and Ruth Kempson, Elsevier 2005), and Colloquial Swahili (with Donovan McGrath, Routledge 2003/2012). He is also the founding chair of the International Conference on Bantu Languages.