Research interests / Forschungsschwerpunkte

My research has centred on two themes, with a fair amount of overlap:

The languages of the extended Middle East, in particular the region covered by ancient Mesopotamia, now divided up between Iraq, Turkey and Iran, with a particular focus on Kurdish. The region is deeply fascinating in its own right, but I tend to see it primarily as a laboratory for investigating more general issues of language change, language typology, and the sociolinguistics of minority languages. In particular, we have developed the concecpt of “transition zone”, geographical areas at the overlap of established linguistic areas, which are characterized by opposing typological values (for example, OV versus VO). The region of Western Asia, and in particular Mesopotamia, is a canonical example of transition zone. We have documented this for several word order features in a sample of around 40 languages of the region, see the Word Order in Western Asia data bank. The background, methodology, and major findings of the project are outlined in the open-access volume:

Post-predicate elements in the Western Asian Transition Zone. A corpus-based approach to areal typology. Edited by Geoffrey Haig, Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand, Donald Stilo, Laurentia Schreiber, Nils N. Schiborr (Berlin: Language Science Press, to appear).

The organisation and structure of connected discourse cross-linguistically, a branch of corpus-based typology, conducted in collaboration with Stefan Schnell. Data, background information, and published research from this project are available at the Multi-CAST website (Multilingual Corpus of Annotated Spoken Texts).