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The following text has been machine translated from the German and has undergone no postediting.
In her research, Annemarie Verkerk employs complex statistical methods to answer the question of what connects languages and what divides them, using as wide a range of data as possible. In the past, linguistic typologists have usually relied on samples of languages for such studies, which, however, only take into account a fraction of the available data. Annemarie Verkerk therefore adopts a comprehensive approach to examine both historical changes and sociolinguistic influences, in order to better understand how people use languages and how languages change. Her areas of specialisation are linguistic typology and the history of language.
Her research interests cover a wide range of topics – from negation and grammatical gender systems in Bantu languages, through word order variations, applied information theory and number systems, to typological universals. Annemarie Verkerk and her team in the department of Language Science and Technology are currently building the so-called 'Corpus of Indo-European Prose Plus (CIEP+)', which will also include under-represented languages. Annemarie Verkerk also leads two research projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG): one within the now-concluding collaborative research centre on Information Density and Linguistic Encoding (SFB 1102) and another in cooperation with the Université Aix- Marseille in France. Annemarie Verkerk has published on the topic of linguistic universals in high-impact journals, most recently in *Nature Human Behaviour*, together with fellow researchers.
Professional background
After studying linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands), Annemarie Verkerk completed her Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She subsequently worked as a researcher at the University of Reading (UK) and at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. Since 2019, Verkerk has been an assistant professor in the department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University. She will take up her professorship in 'Language Science' on 31 May.
Background: Department of Language Science and Technology
The department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University is dedicated to research and teaching at the interface of language, cognition and artificial intelligence at a high international standard. Research there focuses on how computers can process language, how the human brain understands and produces it and how its structure, use and variation can be empirically investigated.
Since 1973, the Department of Language Science and Technology has been continuously involved in major national and international collaborative projects, including collaborative research centres and Clusters of Excellence. It cooperates closely with Computer Science, Philology and Psychology. As part of the Saarland Informatics Campus, it is also linked to the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence and the Max Planck Institutes for Computer Science and Software Systems.
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