I am a linguistic typologist working with corpus-based and phylogenetic methods for studying language diversity. My current research adds this angle to the SFB 1102 IDeaL project in order to explain cross-linguistic patterns in information distribution. For the 3rd Phase of SFB 1102 funding, Luigi Talamo and I have beep preparing CIEP+, the Corpus of Indo-European Prose and more. Read more about CIEP here. 

My research program spans from work on inferring phylogenetic relationships (phylogenetic trees)…

  • for example, on the Dravidian language family, see here;
  • for a recent paper on accounting for reticulation when inferring phylogenies, see here;

    …to using these trees to do quantitative typology using phylogenetic comparative methods. I have worked on a variety of topics using these methods, among others;

    • on motion event encoding, see my PhD thesis;
    • on numeral typology, see here, I am also involved in Numeralbank, a work in progress containing information on the numeral systems of 1000s of languages;
    • on the ecology of language diversity, joining Chris Bentz, see here and here;
    • recent work that will appear soon in Linguistics and Language Dynamics and Change includes work on Bantu gender systems with Francesca Di Garbo 
    • work on Indo-European negative existential constructions with Shahar Shirtz, see here and here. 

    But I have worked on other topics too:

    • see here for the presentation of BDPROTO, a database comprising phonological inventory data from 257 ancient and reconstructed languages, including a case study on rates of change of consonantal and vocalic systems;
    • see here for a paper on modeling vocabulary using approximate Bayesian computation, methodology usually employed in population genetics;
    • and see here  for a study on source and goal marking in various European languages

    Some of these papers can be found on one of the outlets below. If you need a copy of something and can’t find it, please write to me.

    https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Annemarie_Verkerk
    https://scholar.google.nl/citations?user=SHeP1a4AAAAJ&hl=nl&oi=sra
    https://iuni-saarland.academia.edu/AnnemarieVerkerk
    http://humans-who-read-grammars.blogspot.de/search/label/Annemarie

    You can find some videos by me here:

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC81w93RNWTlj1UB_OOxOVoQ 

    Contact: annemarie.verkerk[at]uni-saarland.de