Invited speakers
Professor Svetlana Petrova (Bergische Universität Wuppertal).
She has studied the role of information structure in language variation and change, with a particular emphasis on early Germanic, and has a long-standing interest in corpus linguistics and formal diachronic syntax. Her current fields of research comprise the meaning and use of various types of nominal expressions, including pronouns, in the history of German, as well as the development of the determiner system of German.
Professor Koenraad De Smedt (University of Bergen).
Koenraad De Smedt has been professor of computational linguistics at the University of Bergen since 1995. His current interests are in corpus linguistics, particularly treebanks, and machine learning. He is active in organizing research infrastructure and is currently coordinating CLARINO. He is also participating in MediaFutures, a center for research-based innovation. He has also been involved in international researcher training and has coordinated three Marie Curie initial training networks.
Professor Jennifer Smith (University of Glasgow).
Her research is in language variation and change, concentrating on the morphosyntactic features of non-standard dialects through the use of online corpora. She has directed a number of ESRC, AHRC and British Academy funded projects, including Caregiver and child in the acquisition of variation, Obsolescence vs stability in a Shetland dialect: evidence from three generations of speakers and One speaker, two dialects: bidialectalism across the generations in a Scottish community. She has conducted research on Scottish dialects and their relationships to colonial Englishes in North America (co-author Sali Tagliamonte), sociolinguistic development in the childhood years (co-author Sophie Holmes-Elliott), and on the interface between formal theories of language and variation (co-author David Adger). She is currently the Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded The Scots Syntax Atlas, a major new digital resource for the analysis of speech patterns across Scotland.
Professor Dominika Skrzypek (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan).
Dominika Skrzypek is professor at Department of Scandinavian Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. Her main research interest is diachrony of grammatical categories. She has published on decline of case, in particular the dative case, loss of masculine-feminine gender distinction and rise of definite and indefinite articles in Swedish. She is also the co-author of the first book on runes and runic alphabet written and published in Polish.
