Dr. Laura Becker

CV

I am a typologist and corpus linguists, and I currently work as an assistant professor (Akad. Rätin a. Z.) at the Department of General Linguistics at the University of Freiburg. In my PhD thesis, I gave a typological overview of articles and article systems in the world’s languages. I have worked on various other topics from a cross-linguistic perspective, trying to approach questions from a quantitative perspective. Currently, I am interested in the role of (coding) efficiency in shaping grammatical structures in language change and in their crosslinguistic manifestations.

Selected Publications

• Laura Becker & Malchukov, Andrej. 2022. Semantic maps and typological hierarchies: Evidence for the Actionality Hierarchy. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 41(1). 31-66.

• Becker, Laura. 2021. Articles in the world’s languages. Berlin: De Gruyter.

• Guzmán Naranjo, Matías & Laura Becker. 2021 (aop). Statistical bias control in typology. Linguistic Typology.

• Guzmán Naranjo, Matías & Laura Becker. 2021. Coding efficiency in nominal inflection: expectedness and type frequency effects. Linguistics Vanguard 7(s3).

• Becker, Laura & Gertrud Schneider-Blum. 2020. Morphological marking of contrast in Tima. Glossa 5(1). 1–35.

FRIAS research project

The distribution of zero marking in inflectional morphology: A typological corpus study

The goal of this project is to provide a better understanding of the crosslinguistic distribution of zero marking in inflectional morphology. Zero marking is often an implicit part of typological discussions about frequency and how efficiency plays a role in shaping grammar. It is usually assumed to correspond to the extreme form of short markers and to express highly frequent functions. Whether or not, however, this really is the case is still an empirical question. Therefore, the aim of this project is to analyse the frequency and distribution of zero markers in inflectional morphology and compare those to shorter vs. longer markers. To do so, I will use the DoReCo data, which i a collection of corpora from 50 typologically diverse languages. The annotation and its link to the phonetic data will allow me capture the length of segments as their duration, which allows for a more realistic representation of linguistic structure than in previous studies.