Frank Seifart Frank Seifart (PhD Nijmegen, 2005) is a linguist with expertise in morphosyntactic, semantic, and prosodic typology, in language contact and history, in language documentation and corpora, and in Amazonian languages. His research puts world-wide linguistic diversity center stage in a multidisciplinary approach to linguistic theory, language history, and psycholinguistics. He created and edited databases and corpora of spoken language, especially on small, non-Indo-European languages, including data from his own fieldwork on Amazonian languages. These provide a broad empirical basis and ensure sustainable replicability of his research through direct links to documented primary data. By using representative samples of the world's languages - balancing areal, genealogical and cultural biases - he aims to advance our understanding of human cognition and linguistic behaviour, overcoming the dangerous focus on WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic) populations in much of linguistic research so far. Using this approach, he studied diverse linguistic phenomena, for instance: prosodic phrasing in a sample of 51 languages, language contact in a sample of 100 pairs of donor- and recipient languages, and the semantic typology of verbs of handling, especially clothing items, in a sample of 30 languages.

CNRS lab Structure et Dynamique des Langues (SeDyL)