Abstract
Uitgaand van de continu-vs.-categorisch-problematiek zien we hoe verschillende taalheoretische modellen (voornamelijk Bidirectional Phonology and Phonetics en Optimality Theory) fonetiek en fonologie aan elkaar koppelen, en hoe ze de variatie tussen de talen van de wereld proberen af te bakenen en te verklaren. Wat is een mogelijke taal en wat is een onmogelijke? Kan men voorspellen hoe een taal kan of niet kan evolueren?
Mini-bio:
Joachim Kokkelmans is postdoctoral research assistant in German Linguistics at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. His work focuses on the phonetics and phonology of Germanic and Romance varieties, with a particular interest in sibilants, sound change and computer-assisted methods.
He holds a Master’s degree in German and Scandinavian Linguistics and Literature from Ghent University (2017) and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Verona (2021). In his Ph.D. thesis, co-supervised by professors at the universities of Verona, Bozen-Bolzano and Amsterdam, he gathered data about the sibilant inventories of languages all over the world to create a sibilant typology that reflects and explains the large variation observed. His main interests lie in understanding patterns of dialectal and typological variation, the phonetics-phonology interface, Germanic-Romance contact and Alpine (minority) languages. He teaches German Linguistics to Ladin students at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.