Department of Linguistics

Staff

Dr. Marius Zemp

Lecturer

Phone
+41 31 684 36 07
E-Mail
marius.zemp@unibe.ch
Office
B 169
Postal Address
Universität Bern
Institut für Sprachwissenschaft
Länggassstrasse 49
3012 Bern

Research Profile

Reconstructing the history of the Tibetic languages

Hundreds of verb stems have different meanings in an eastern and a western branch of Tibetan – a comprehensive account of these functional divergences goes hand in hand with a detailed reconstruction of a Proto-Tibetan which, on the one hand, facilitates a neat explanation also of how evidentiality developed in different modern varieties, and on the other, suggests that the language originates from an expanded pidgin. (More...)

A diachronic typology of evidential contrasts (from a Himalayan perspective)

While work on evidentiality traditionally (e.g. Aikhenvald 2004, 2018) ignores agentive markers, an adequate account of the evidential contrasts found in Tibetan and neighboring languages needs to include them. In fact, most of the evidential contrasts we find in this region involve one verb form which mainly occurs when the speaker/addressee is the subject in a statement/question (‘egophoric’) and another mainly when s/he isn’t (‘allophoric’). (More...)

Reconstructing the history of the Kaike-Ghale-Tamangic languages

My work on Kaike and Kutang and Northern Ghale suggests that these languages belong to the Tamangic family, and that most if not all languages of this family have been heavily influenced by the Tibetic varieties with which there is widespread bilingualism – a  comparative dictionary of the Kaike-Ghale-Tamangic languages would allow us to identify features that are shared by (some of) these languages and thus need to be reconstructed for their common ancestors and features that were borrowed from (or modelled after) a Tibetic or another contact language. (More...)

Towards a dialect geography of intonation in Swiss German

Having captured a salient intonational difference between Valais and Midland varieties of Swiss German (Zemp 2018), I just taught a field linguistics class here at the ISW in which we identified intonational characteristics of various other Swiss German dialects – we will present our major findings at the Alemann:innentagung 2024, which takes place in Bern on September 9–11 (see below for the abstract).