Language change, deflection, syncretism, politeness, second person
Theoretical syntax; comparative syntax (e.g., Kwa vs. Germanic/Romance, Kwa vs. Sinitic, Kwa vs. Caribbean creoles); Discourse-syntax interface; language creation and language change
Adelaar’s research originally focused on the linguistic description of South American native languages. He has specialized in the indigenous languages of the Andean region in their ancient and modern versions. Among his fields of interest are the study of Quechua dialects, including issues of reconstruction and the interpretation of dialect history in the context of archaeological results, and the rescue of data on (nearly) extinct Andean languages. [...]
Computational modeling of language acquisition, statistical learning, generalization, speech segmentation, artificial language learning, phonology.
Referential and non-referential uses of nominals with and without articles
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Amerindian languages, especially indigenous South American languages; revitalization of older linguistic documentation (manuscripts containing language descriptions, grammars, and lexicons of amerindian languages).
Gender variation in discourse; Interactional Sociolinguistics; Semantics & Pragmatics;
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complex predicates and transitivity, mood and modality systems, discourse markers in Omotic; comparative Afroasiatic.
Body-part nouns as a source for reflexives; reflexives in subject function; case and agreement marking in Georgian and other Kartvelian (South Caucasian) languages; complex agreement systems; originally nominal affixation on finite verbs in Kartvelian languages; contact-induced morphosyntactic change; repair strategies in discourse. [...]
My interest is in language production and bilingualism. More specifically, I study bilingual production with the aim to investigate language production mechanisms in general. And, even more specifically, I am interested in how non-linguistic information is initially processed so that it can be put into words. [...]
Learnability, Metrical phonology, Optimality Theory and related
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Within phonology: prosody (mainly word stress), phonotactics.
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Clausal agreement (the mechanism(s), typological survey of agreement patterns); case and agreement in ergative languages; quirky subjects; external possession: predicative and adnominal possession in Russian (possessive PPs); infinitival constructions (raising and control).
Gender * Typology * Morphology * Agreement * Language variation * Corpus linguistics
Name-giving in Romance languages; lexicology; Lexicography; Semantics.
Comparative psycholinguistics.