Jordan Chark

I am part of the scientific staff (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the institute for German language and linguistics (Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, associated with the Collaborative Research Centre (DE: Sonderforschungsbereich) 1412 “Register” (Project A10; PIs Viola Schmitt and Artemis Alexiadou).

In Project A10, we are interested in seemingly optional morphosyntactic doubling (e.g. two comparative morphemes in more taller) and the consequences thereof for our understanding of how situational dimensions interface with the choices speakers make from sets of available alternatives. Doubling results in more redundancy, which we hypothesise ought to be advantageous in situational contexts involving some degree of uncertainty regarding the question-under-discussion.

Before coming to HU, I was a doctoral researcher for three years at the Leibniz-Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin, also affiliated with CRC 1412. I submitted my dissertation “Understanding meaning-driven variation along the grammaticalisation trajectory: the case of Icelandic búinn”, written under the supervision of Uli Sauerland, Stephanie Solt and Artemis Alexiadou, in mid-2024 and I am scheduled to defend on November 13, 2024. You can read a little about my dissertation below.

Feel free to get in touch: jordan.chark [AT] hu-berlin.de

Dissertation

My dissertation focuses on the interfaces between semantics/pragmatics and research on variation and change. I approach the question of how intra-individual variation in synchrony relates to language change through the lens of pragmatic reasoning. I focus on data from the aspectual domain in Icelandic. More specifically, I investigate the emergence of the perfect construction with búinn að and the ensuing consequences of a language having two semantically overlapping expressions for expressing perfect meanings. I approach this question from a number of perspectives, drawing on formal semantic theory, statistical modelling of historical corpora, and game-theoretic modelling.

My dissertation work is situated more broadly within Project A05 “Modeling meaning-driven register variation”, directed by PIs Uli Sauerland and Stephanie Solt, based at the ZAS. The project deals with so-called non-equivalent alternatives: situational alternations between linguistic expressions that have functional overlap but are logically distinct. For instance, “7:53” as opposed to “8 o’clock”. These differ from prototypical sociolinguistic variables, which are logically equivalent. Logical overlap, however, necessitates the activation of pragmatic reasoning, which makes certain predictions. We are interested in the relationship between this pragmatic reasoning, on the one hand, and the social meaning evoked by the choice of a given expression, on the other.

Registergeknister

I am part of the production team and occassional co-host of the podcast Registergeknister (alongside Roodabeh Akbari, Sophia Döring and Peter Schmidt). In each episode, we discuss the research of one of the projects of Collaborative Research Centre 1412. The episodes are usually in German. You can listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Some of our recent episodes include:

• On social hierarchies and the ancient Egyptian language: Linguistische Ausgrabungen: Wie spricht man mit dem Pharao?
• On the acquisition of academic registers of German: Wie viele Deutsch-Register sprichst du? Registerkompetenz macht den Unterschied
• On adjectives in the history of English and using parsed corpora: Von Rittern und Adjektiven: Wie untersuchen Linguist:innen Variation in historischen Texten?
• On linguistic fieldwork and the multi-lingual context of Bislama in Vanuatu: [EN] Sprachen aus dem Schnellkochtopf: Register in Kreols (Teil 2)

Prior to the PhD

Prior to my employment at HU and ZAS, I did an MSc. in General Linguistics at the University of Potsdam. During my time in Potsdam, I did research on modality in Finnish using semantic fieldwork methodology (my MSc. thesis) as well as conducted theoretically-driven experiments on embedded questions (in the XPrag.de ExQ project).

These days, I work mostly on Icelandic (with ocassional forays into other North Germanic languages, as well as German). My interest in the Icelandic language began from a young age. I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Iceland, where I developed a nascent interest in historical linguistics, linguistic variation and language ideology.

Outside of linguistics

When I am not doing linguistics, you might find me indulging in geography-related interests (Microsoft Flight Simulator and Geoguessr alongside actual travel), reading trans-feminist philosophy (recently: Dysphoria Mundi by Paul Preciado) or learning Yiddish.