Typology of negation (Linguistics)
Line Mikkelsen, Professor
Linguistics
Applications for Fall 2025 are closed for this project.
This project situates negation strategies in Kalaallisut, a polysynthetic Inuit of Greenland, cross-linguistically. One Kalaallisut negation strategy is to use a negative auxiliary, which is a rare strategy (only 4% of a 1157 languages sample has a negative auxiliary). Kalaallisut also has a negative suffix and goal of the project is to determine how rare it is to have both these negation strategies in a polysynthetic language.
Role: The research apprentice will work with grammars and other language descriptions in 20-40 languages selected from existing typologies and determine the morphological type of the languages and its negation strategies. The research assistant will tabulate these findings and write up a report that summarizes them along with discussion of any methodological issues.
Qualifications: Linguistics 100 necessary, Linguistics 115 and Linguistics 120 preferred. Reading knowledge of Spanish, German, and/or French is an asset.
Hours: to be negotiated
Social Sciences