☕️(she/her)
Postdoctoral Researcher in Linguistics
I research how languages diversify over time and how we can trace and explain diversification. I work on tone and sound change, subgrouping, and person marking, with a focus on Mixtecan (Mexico). I combine quantitative methods and data-driven comparison with detailed analyses of individual varieties. To develop the empirical foundations needed, I conduct long-term fieldwork on Mixtec and Cuicatec varieties and develop openly available cross-linguistic resources.
I’m currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Bern. I have a PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA) and the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany). My dissertation is a collection of three articles on Mixtec(an) language history using qualitative and quantitative methods.
News and updates:
PhD in Linguistics
2022
University of California Santa Barbara
MA in General Linguistics
2015
Universität Zürich
BA in General Linguistics and Comparative Indo-European Linguistics
2013
Universität Zürich
This database provides a comprehensive archive of Mixtec sound changes from 105 contemporary varieties, coded with a common methodology. It now also includes tone change for 42 …
This database contains lexical entries from 137 Mixtecan languages, which are cognate coded by language experts including myself and standardized to IPA. It is a work in progress …
A community-based documentation and description of Tù'un Na Ñuu Sá Matxí Ntxè'è (San Martín Duraznos Mixtec) including pedagogical materials
The Constituency and Convergence database (CCDB) is a typological database that contains planar structures and results of constituency tests applied across multiple languages with …
Quantitative approaches to dialect area subgrouping and tone change in Mixtec(an)
Description: This class introduces the conceptual background and methodology for creating, annotating, cleaning, and analyzing linguistic data sets and databases using the programming language R (with tidyverse). It covers database design principles, how to read in and clean data sets, and visualizations (including maps), as well as good coding practices with reproducibility and reusability in mind.
Description: This class provides an introduction to Anthropological linguistics, the study of human language in its social and cultural context. We examine theories on universalism and relativism and discuss their impact on the study of language with a focus on endangered languages. The course covers core concepts in anthropological linguistics such as kinship, politeness, color, and space. Further guiding questions concern the mechanisms by which culture might shape language, the universality of such processes and how much they can vary depending on context.
Description: This class provides an introduction to data exploration and descriptive and inferential statistics with a focus on applications in (comparative) linguistics using the programming language R. Topics include: frequentist versus Bayesian statistics; linear, logistic, and multilevel models; clustering and random forests; and other statistical analyses depending on the participants’ interests.
Description (in German): Dieser Kurs behandelt die Grundlagen der Morphosyntax, indem Konzepte der Morphologie, der Syntax, und der Interaktionen beider Disziplinen als Einführung vorgestellt werden. Die Studierenden lernen, Konzepte wie Koordination und Rekursion auf Wort- und Satzebene als ähnlich zu begreifen, und einen ersten Anblick in die Struktur von Sprache erhalten.
Teach-In at the 14th Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology, UT Austin, Dec. 2022
Teach-In for conference participants at the ALT2022 taught by Sandra Auderset, Olena Shcherbakova, and Adam Tallman. The code and materials for “Quantitative Methods for Typologists Using R” teach-in can be found on GitHub.