Anna SjöbergPhD student
About me
I am a PhD student in language typology/linguistic diversity and the subject of my thesis is the cross-linguistic expression of knowledge ascription.
By ‘knowledge ascription’ I mean expressions such as “I know that Stockholm is the capital of Sweden”, “I know her quite well” or “I know how to use language corpora”. As can be seen in these examples, English uses the same word in all of these contexts (knowing that, knowing a person and knowing how), but as we can see even from such a closely related language as Swedish, this is not necessarily the case (in Swedish, it would be: “Jag vet att Stockholm är Sveriges huvudstad”, “Jag känner henne väl” and “Jag kan använda korpora”.)
This kind of variation is one of the focuses of my research. How common is it that languages lump all these together under the same term, as English does, and, conversely, how common is the Swedish way? Do we find other distinctions than those mentioned above encoded? If so, which ones are common and which ones are rare? Are there areal patterns?
I am also interested in the origins of words for knowing (for example, perception verbs), the morphosyntax of knowledge ascription clauses and the discourse functions of know-words.
To investigate this I am primarily using translations of the New Testament which exist for over 1,500 languages. I am also using a shorter questionnaire, to complement the results gained from the NT-materials.
My supervisors are prof. Bernhard Wälchli and prof. Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm.
I started my PhD in January 2019. Before that, I did my Bachelor's and Master's degree at Uppsala University, where I also worked for several years as a research assistant to prof. Anju Saxena, working mainly on a typological survey of South Asia using the early 20th century work "Linguistic Survey of India" and on the description of the Tibeto-Burman language Kanashi.
