Research

I study how people make sense of the environment through language: how spatial meaning is anchored in the world, how it shifts when speakers are moving through it, and how it varies across generations and social groups within a single community.

That question runs through all of my work and I approach it with the tools of several linguistic subfields at once: morphosyntactic description, experimental psycholinguistics, phonetic analysis, and semantic typology — combined with long-term fieldwork and geospatial methods. Below is how those strands fit together.

Spatial grammar and morphosyntax

My PhD thesis is a description and analysis of the spatial system of Wik-Mungkan (Cape York, Australia), covering case marking, locational nominals, posture verbs and demonstratives as a single interacting system. The spatial system is considered through a sociotopographic lens, considering sociodemographic, environmental and cognitive factors.

Related work includes posture verbs in locative and existential predication across three Australian languages (with Eleanor Yacopetti and Tom Ennever) and the semantics of geocentric terms in Wik-Mungkan (with Bill Palmer).

Language on the move

I am currently a postdoc at Lund University on the ERC-funded project Walking while Talking (PI: Karolin Obert), continuing fieldwork in Aurukun on Wik-Mungkan.

The project asks what happens to language when the speech situation itself is in motion. My strands within it so far include spatial reference on the move, temporal expression and tense use while walking, and practical documentary considerations of this type of data collection.

Experimental and psycholinguistic methods

Experimental design is part of how I work, in the lab and in the field.

For my Master’s thesis I designed a mouse-tracking study of the coreference resolution of Danish reflexive possessive pronouns, testing pragmatic against syntactic influences on pronoun interpretation. I have since participated in the Lab for Applied Language Science at the University of Newcastle, developing interactive eye-tracking tasks.

In the field, I have used and helped develop a range of elicitation methods targeting spatial language and descriptions. My acting can be seen on full display in the Associated Motion Video Stimuli designed by Ditte Boeg Thomsen and Mads Nielsen.

Semantic typology

Underlying all of this is an interest in how meaning is structured across the world’s languages. This runs through my work on reciprocal constructions in Acazulco Otomí (Danish article, English in preparation), on frames of reference in Nahuan languages and in Wik-Mungkan, and in a pioneering paper (in Danish) on how the domain of baked goods is structured differently across a handful of European languages.

Fieldwork and documentation

I have been doing linguistic fieldwork since 2017. Alongside my work in Aurukun, I have documented spatial language in Nahuatl as spoken in a number of communities, and reciprocal constructions and spatial language in Acazulco Otomí (State of Mexico).

I work regularly with ELAN, FLEx, Praat and QGIS, and I am interested in how geospatial and experimental technology can be combined with traditional documentation methods — and in how making those tools accessible can support both experts and non-experts doing documentation work. Always happy to receive suggestions for new technology to try.