Jordan Chark

Who am I?

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz-Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin, associated with the Collaborative Research Centre (DE: Sonderforschungsbereich) 1412 “Register” (Project A10; PI Artemis Alexiadou).

I did my doctoral research at the ZAS (conferred by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), also within CRC 1412. My dissertation project concentrated on understanding how register-specific alternations can emerge, focusing on a case study (the vera búinn að periphrastic aspectual constrruction) from the diachrony of Icelandic.

I am a member of the editorial board at the open access journal Register Aspects of Language in Situation Journal (REALIS).

It’s important to me that cutting-edge findings from my field get communicated to the public: I am part of the team behind the podcast Registergeknister in which we endeavour to do just that.

I grew up in Vancouver, Canada (so I am a speaker of PNW English) and have now been resident in Berlin for about a decade.

Research interests

My primary research interests are formal semantics/pragmatics, sociolinguistics and the interfaces between them. I employ a variety of methods, including (historical) corpus analysis, acceptability judgement experiments and probabilistic (e.g. game-theoretic) modeling.

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.

My work often incorporates a diachronic dimension; I strongly believe that such a perspective strengthens the analysis of any linguistic phenomenon. For example, I have published on the role of historical (narrative) registers in the development of the modern Icelandic aspectual system.

Academic history

Previously, I have also been affiliated with the institute for German language and linguistics (Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

I completed an MSc. in General Linguistics at the University of Potsdam. Prior to that, I did undergraduate studies at the University of Iceland, where I developed a nascent interest in historical linguistics, linguistic variation and language ideology.

Contact: jordan.chark [AT] leibniz-zas.de / jordan.chark [AT] gmail.com