Research Summary
My research aims at understanding the system underlying each individual Berber language, in relation to the variation observed in the whole Berber language family. For this, my analysis is distributed across several levels, whose interaction is of particular importance for me: morphology, syntax, semantics, prosody, gesture, and also, culture (oral literature, and food).
My comparative work within Berber involves mainly Kabyle, Tarighit (Oued Righ Berber), Tumzabt, Taggargrent, Siwi, Ghadamsi, Tashawit (Shawiya), Tashelhiyt (Shilha), Tamazight (Middle Atlas Berber), Tahaggart and Tamashek.
I work on spontaneous spoken data, and am interested in all linguistic aspects of oral production. I initiated a corpus project for Berber languages, I have coordinated one on spoken Afroasiatic languages (CorpAfroAs) (2006-2011), and another one (2013-2017) on spoken corpora in lesser-described languages and cross-linguistic comparability (CorTypo), both funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche.
I have also initiated, in collaboration with Martine Vanhove, a Labex project on the Typology and Corpus Annotation of Information Structure and Grammatical Relations (TCA ISGR) (2012-2022), and have coordinated it with her until 2014.
I have created and am implementing a project supporting the auto-documentation of Amazigh communities, i.e. the documentation by speakers themselves, of their own languages and cultures, using resources available in their own environment (Amazigh Languages and Auto-Documentation Project).
Since 2018, I have developed an important dimension of my research connecting the language of food to both documentation, and reconstruction of the evolution of and contacts between Berber languages ( see e.g. Food and Language in the Amazigh/Berber area).
I have been doing fieldwork on Kabyle for twenty years, and in 2012 I have started the analysis and documentation of an endangered Berber language, Tarighit, spoken in the region of Oued Righ (Touggourt) in Algeria.
You can find details on my Berber Linguistics seminar at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes on https://www.ephe.fr/formations/conferences/linguistique-berbere.
Main research topics
- Aspect, mood, negation and reference in Berber
- The interaction between prosody, information structure and syntax in Kabyle
- The role of corpora in cross-linguistic research
- Grammaticalization and comparative Berber morphosyntax
- Language documentation and endangered Berber languages
Research Projects
-
CorTypo (Designing spoken corpora for cross-linguistic research) interfaces a typological database to annotated spoken corpora in twelve lesser-described languages belonging to different families and phyla.
The aim is to compare functions across languages, starting from language-internal categories, in view of providing an empirical, bottom-up typology. -
TCA ISGR (Typology and Corpus Annotation of Information Structure and Grammatical Relations) is a project which aims at developing innovative schemes for the corpus annotation of information structure phenomena and grammatical relations, so that comparability can be achieved across the spoken corpora created by the members of the project.
-
CorpAfroAs (Spoken Corpora in AfroAsiatic Languages : Prosodic and Morphosyntactic Analysis) is a pilot project which created corpora in thirteen different lesser-described spoken AfroAsiatic languages, in view of making them searchable through a query engine.
Each corpus is prosodically segmented into minor and major intonation units, and morphosyntactically-annotated. -
IUF Junior : Designing spoken corpora for lesser-described languages was the theme of the individual research project submitted to the IUF. It consisted in conceptualizing a framework for the creation of corpora in languages with no written tradition, incorporating the latest advances in the treatment of spoken corpora for major languages.
The central aspects of the research were transcription, and segmentation.