Speakers

Masato Kobayashi  
University of Tokyo

Bio
Masato Kobayashi is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Tokyo. He earned his M.A. in Sanskrit from Kyoto University, and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000, under the guidance of Dr. George Cardona. He has worked on Sanskrit and Dravidian tribal languages, and his publications include 'Historical Phonology of Old Indo-Aryan Consonants' (2004), 'Texts and Grammar of Malto' (2012), and 'The Kurux Language' (2017, co-authored with Bablu Tirkey).

Lecture title
Asyndetic Conditionals Clauses in Brahui

John J. Lowe  
University of Oxford

Bio
John Lowe is associate professor of Sanskrit at the Wolfson College, Universtiy of Oxford. His research interests include: Sanskrit language and linguistics, the ancient Indian grammatical tradition, Indo-Iranian comparative and historical linguistics (Sanskrit, Prakrit, Avestan, Old Persian), syntactic theory, formal semantics, Indo-European comparative philology, Greek and Latin historical linguistics, Germanic comparative and historical linguistics.

He is currently coordinating the LINGUINDIC “Linguistics from India: new ideas for modern linguistics from ancient India”project, a five-year ERC funded project; and “Uncovering Sanskrit Syntax”, a three-year Leverhulme Trust funded project (2019-2022).

Lecture title
Problematic control constructions in Sanskrit

John Peterson  
Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel

Bio
John Peterson is full professor of General Linguistics at the University of Kiel, Germany. His research fields are related to all aspects of South Asian languages, especially Munda (Kharia, Santali, Mundari) and Indo-Aryan (Sadri, Konkani, Nepali, Pali, Sanskrit). In particular, he is interested in  language theory, sociolinguistics, language contact, language typology and historical linguistics. Among his special interests: grammatical relations, parts of speech, grammatical voice, finiteness, spoken vs written language, language contact and multilingualism, language and migration, Role and Reference Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar.

He is founder and co-editor of the series Brill's Studies in South and Southwest Asian Languages (BSSAL) and Chief International Expert Advisor for the International Documentation Center for Endangered Indigenous Languages and Cultures, Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee University (DSPMU), Ranchi, Jharkhand, India. He is co-creator of the The Kiel South Asian Typological Database, together with Ivani, Jessica Katiuscia and Lennart Chevallier.

Lecture title
Why the Ganga isn’t the Amazonas: Linguistic diversity in riverine systems and what this means for South Asian prehistorical linguistic diversity

Uta Reinöhl  
Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg

Bio 
Uta Reinöhl is professor of General Linguistics at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Her research interests include many aspects of  Indo-Aryan and Indo-European languages, of the Tibeto-Burman languages and the South-Asian Area. In particular, she is interested in grammaticalization theory, historical syntax, non-configurationality, serial verbs and tonal phonology.

She is co-speaker of FRIAS Project Group on Repetition in language (2022/2023) (together with Prof. Stefan Pfänder, as well as Prof. Dr. Achim Rabus, Prof. Dr. Daniela Marzo, Prof. Dr. Lars Bülow, T. Mark Ellison, PhD). She is also Head of an Emmy Noether research group at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, on the topic: Non-hierarchicality in Grammar, Construction formation without word class distinction across categories and languages.

She is also a member of the VedaWeb project (located at the University of Cologne, in cooperation with Prof. Daniel Kölligan, Prof. Rolshoven, Prof. Patrick Sahle), since July 2017.

Lecture title
From sound to text in real time - Eastern Himalayan oral art transcribed, translated, transformed.