People

Silva Nurmio

Silva is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki. Her work deals with grammatical number (e.g. singular vs. plural) which is a field that encompasses morphology, syntax and semantics. Her MPhil (Aberystwyth University) and doctoral theses (University of Cambridge) focused on Welsh (Celtic, Indo-European), with comparative work with the other Celtic languages. Already in this work she was also interested in the typological context of Welsh and the Celtic languages: how their grammatical number systems compare with those of other languages of the world, and what the Celtic languages can add to our existing knowledge of them. With the Individuation in the grammar project she is expanding her interest in grammatical number to look at the typology of singulatives and unitization cross-linguistically.

Contact: silva.nurmio@helsinki.fi

More info:

University of Helsinki research portal (includes teaching info)

Academia.edu

HAT project

Welsh Linguistics Seminar

 

Rahel T. Dires

Rahel is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Helsinki. Her main area of interest includes languages spoken in the Horn of Africa. Her BA thesis focused on the analysis and collection of loanwords from Italian, English and French into Amharic. During the MA studies, her interest for Afroasiatic languages increased: her thesis was a study on situatives in Somali and Amharic, through the innovative Constructive Adpositional Grammars (CxAdGrams) framework. Her current project is a typological study on singulatives in Cushitic languages.

Contact: rahel.t.dires@helsinki.fi

University of Helsinki research portal

Academia.edu

CV

Twitter

Matilda Carbo

Matilda Carbo is a MA student in Linguistics at the University of Helsinki. She assists Silva Nurmio’s research on singulatives, and Maria Khachaturian’s research on Mano (Mande). Her MA thesis will tackle singulatives in Yiddish.

Contact: sara.carrier-bordeleau@helsinki.fi

 

Blodyn

Blodyn the red dragon is the project’s office manager, who guards the office at all hours. Her main duties include keeping the archive in order and overseeing the general workflow of the project. From time to time she makes coffee and tea but this is not to be relied upon. Her background is in pyrotechnics and Welsh folklore studies, and for years she has been caught up in a fiery scholarly dispute with her colleague, the white dragon. Her name means ‘flower’ in Welsh and this form is sort of a singulative (see Nurmio 2019: 134-135). One day she will reveal her life story in a blog post, so stay tuned.

Contact: never answers emails