Research Profile
My research is mainly at the intersection of documentation linguistics, corpus anthropolinguistics and typology. Since 2011, I work with the Nisvai community, in the South-East of Malekula, Vanuatu (nisv1234) on an ethnolinguistic documentation of the community and its language practices. During my PhD (2019), at the intersection of linguistics, anthropology and NLP, I built a corpus of oral narratives and showed how certain variations in the narrative texts produced by the Nisvai speakers could be associated to the age class of the speaker and the narrative situation. I’ve been working in the documentation of the narratives in particular, producing versatile resources (Aznar & Gala, 2020), useful for the speakers as well as for linguists. I am currently working on the elaboration of a language resource coordinating lexicography and ethnography.
I previously worked at ZAS, where, in collaboration with Seifart (2020, 2022), we elaborated quality criteria and processes for language documentation corpora, and with Lange, we developed a semi-automatized corpus quality checker (2022). I afterward also contributed to a 20 hours corpus of Bislama, with Aru, Krifka, Meyerhoff and Veenstra. From September, I’ll start to work for the Department of Comparative Language Science, at the university of Zürich, within the project Linguits, https://www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en/IDG/research/lingunits.html.
Keywords: language documentation, corpus, ethnolinguistics, ethnography, Vanuatu, Nisvai
