Dr Joseph Lovestrand

Biography

I am a lecturer and researcher in linguistics. I have taught on a range of modules including phonology, morphosyntax, formal syntax, semantics and applied linguistics. Previously, I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at SOAS University of London. My research project looked at the expression of direction and motion in the verbal morphology of Chadic languages. I also taught language documentation and linguistic fieldwork. Prior to my postdoctoral fellowship, I spent over a year in Indonesia, where I facilitated a collaborative process to review sociolinguistic data found in the Ethnologue for languages of Sulawesi. I also helped local communities develop alphabets for the Kodi, Lamboya and Wanukaka languages in Sumba. From 2014 to 2018 I completed my PhD (DPhil) at the University of Oxford, studying serial verb constructions in Barayin, a Chadic language spoken by about 6,000 people in the Guera region of Chad. This work was funded by the Basant Kumar and Sarala Birla Graduate Studentship. During my PhD research, I received a small grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, resulting in a documentation corpus of about 25,000 words. This work was also supported by a small grant from the Endangered Language Fund. My own research specialty is primarily at the interface of semantics and syntax: how words are put together in sentences to form different meanings. Syntax and semantics make up a substantial part of my work in descriptive linguistics, although I have also done research on the phonology of previously undescribed languages in Chad, Cameroon and Indonesia. These projects were not only for research purposes, but also helped promote literacy in previously unwritten languages. Much of my recent research has been from a comparative or typological perspective. In comparative linguistics, we look for common patterns across the languages of the world in order to gain insights into why languages are the way they are. We also find languages that behave in unique ways. These cases sometimes force us to reconsider our generalizations about language, leading to a better understanding of this uniquely human behaviour. I have also worked with a particular approach to modelling syntax and semantics called Lexical-Functional Grammar or LFG. LFG is one of the formal or generative approaches, but is distinguished by its constraint-based assumptions. In this framework, we attempt to model a logical system that can be applied to any language in the world and, in this way, approximate the abstract architecture that underlies the diversity of languages and a human’s ability to learn any existing language.