!!Sebastian Fedden - Biography
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As a linguist with a particular interest in language structure at all levels, language variation and language change, Sebastian Fedden conducts empirical research into non-Indo-European languages from a typological and cognitive perspective. From the beginning of his dissertation in 2003, Papuan languages have been his main area of empirical research, but he also incorporates data from other language families in order to create a broad typological framework. Since the conferral of his Ph.D. in 2007, he has published various in-depth studies on the structure of Mian, as well as other Papuan languages. His grammar of Mian, based on a total on 11 months of original fieldwork in New Guinea, published by De Gruyter Mouton in 2011, was awarded the Georg von der Gabelentz Award by the Association for Linguistic Typology in 2013 as the best grammar published by an academic publisher between 2009 and 2012. The Oxford Guide to the Papuan Languages, a comprehensive, up-to-date and forward-looking overview of the 880 or so Papuan languages co-edited with Prof. Nicholas Evans (ANU Canberra), is currently in print.\\
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As a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey from 2007 to 2014, he developed linguistic typology as a primary research focus. This primarily involves his work on reference hierarchies and their effects on the morphosyntactic marking of verbal arguments, including the development of research materials specifically for this purpose, and his work on the typology of nominal classification (gender and classifiers). Recently, he studied gender assignment in German, a fascinating and notoriously difficult topic. In collaboration with Dr Matías Guzmán Naranjo and Prof. Greville Corbett, he has just published a study on this topic in Language, combining a typological approach with machine learning methods.\\
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He has an international network with collaborators from France, Great Britain, Australia, the Netherlands and Germany. He is committed to promoting young academics and has supervised three doctoral theses (one completed) to date, as well as 44 master’s theses and three bachelor’s theses. Several of his students have chosen careers in linguistics and one of them (Dr Neige Rochant) has already found a permanent position. \\
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As a lecturer at the University of Sydney from 2015 to 2016, as a full professor at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle from 2016 onwards and as a guest professor at the LMU Munich from 2022 to 2026, he represents the subject of general linguistics in its entirety at both bachelor’s and master’s level. In terms of service, he was instrumental in restructuring and partially rebuilding the linguistics curriculum at the University of Sydney. He has served as coordinator of the linguistics Master’s programme at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, and as a member of the doctoral college for general linguistics at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle.\\ \\[{ALLOW view All}][{ALLOW edit sfedden}][{ALLOW upload sfedden}][{ALLOW comment All}]