Dr Elisabeth Norcliffe is currently a visiting researcher with the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey. She recently completed a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford. Previously, she was a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University.
What is the main aim of your research and what key questions or issues does it address?
Much of my research is in the area of linguistic typology, the branch of linguistics that aims to describe and explain the diversity and common patterns across the world’s languages. Within this, semantic typology holds a particular interest for me. Semantic typology is concerned with the expression of meaning across languages. At the level of the word, we can ask: to what extent are the concepts expressed by words free to vary across cultures and to what extent are they constrained by universal aspects of human cognition and communication? Sensory language, which is a current focus, is a particularly rich area for exploring these questions. On the one hand, words expressing sensory concepts must map onto the world as interpreted through our shared perceptual apparatus. On the other hand, we find remarkable diversity in the ways in which languages carve up the sensorium – some languages have only a few basic colour words, for example, while others have very rich colour lexicons. Some languages use a single verb to express the concepts of hearing and smelling, while others distinguish them. The sensory domain therefore gives enormous scope for exploring how the forces shaping meaning categories are pulled between the universal and the culturally specific.
What does your research involve you actually doing on a daily basis, and where do you typically carry out your work?
My research involves a lot of linguistic data collection and analysis. In my semantic typology research, I draw on large global datasets of vocabulary. Some of these I have compiled myself, rather painstakingly, from printed dictionaries and in consultation with speakers of different languages. Increasingly, collective efforts at creating large-scale, online lexical databases have meant that there is now a lot of cross-linguistic data available to researchers at the click of a button. These are wonderful resources that are growing all the time.
I typically carry out my work at home and at the Surrey Morphology Group, where I am based. A lot of my work is collaborative, so I am often remotely connected with geographically far-flung colleagues, sharing ideas, designing studies and writing up results. In addition to my research in typology, I also have a long-standing focus on the consequences of typological variation for language processing. Here, the key question is: how do differences in the ways languages are structured (e.g., differences in basic word order or case systems) affect the way that speakers comprehend and produce language? This line of work involves designing and conducting psycholinguistic experiments and has taken me far from my desk to rural southern Mexico, where I have spent time working with Tseltal (Mayan) speakers in their communities.
What outcomes or contributions do you hope your research will lead to in the future?
Semantic typology has traditionally had a low profile compared to other areas of typology (phonology, morphology and syntax), perhaps partly because meaning is notoriously difficult to compare across languages, and the kinds of data needed for systematic, large-scale comparison have often been hard to come by. This is changing, thanks to advances in cross-linguistic data collection and in analytic methods. I hope that my research in this area will contribute to pushing the field forward. Conveying meaning, is after all, one of the basic functions of language, and so working towards better understanding the diverse ways in which languages achieve this is a fundamental task for the language sciences. Findings in this area also have implications for the cognitive sciences more generally, opening up questions about how diverse semantic systems are afforded by the mind and brain, and how perhaps, in turn, they may exert their own influence on cognition.
One thing working in semantic typology has made me increasingly aware of is how much our understanding of general patterns across languages depends on the data we have available. For example, in the sensory domain, we can identify systematic patterns in how languages express basic meanings such as seeing, hearing and smelling, partly because these meanings tend to be well represented in dictionaries. But languages can make different distinctions, which are far less consistently documented. There are individual reports of languages, for example, that have different words for expressing seeing at a distance vs. seeing up close, or that lexically distinguish between internal bodily sensation vs. external touch. Due to lack of documentation, there are undoubtedly many dimensions of cross-linguistic variation that we simply don't yet know much about. This makes semantic typology a very exciting field to work in, with so much still to discover. On the other hand, given the growing threats to linguistic diversity worldwide, there is also a real sense of urgency to the task of documenting these less well-understood aspects of meaning. I hope my research can help draw attention to these gaps in our knowledge and encourage more detailed semantic documentation of understudied languages.
What aspect of your work is most exciting to you right now?
Right now, I'm particularly excited about the possibility of using patterns of meaning in vocabulary as a window into linguistic prehistory. It's well known that neighbouring languages borrow words from one another (think, for example, of all the words English has borrowed from French). But what's perhaps less well known is that languages can also borrow more abstract patterns of meaning. This includes patterns of polysemy, where a single word expresses multiple meanings, as well as patterns of word formation, where languages adopt similar ways of building complex words (such as 'bird-stone' for 'egg'). By tracing how these patterns are shared across neighbouring languages, we may be able to uncover clues about past contact and cultural interactions, even where there is no written historical record. I find this a really exciting application of semantic typology, and one I'm currently beginning to explore in my own research.
How does this year’s symposium theme, “Language and communication across boundaries”, relate to your research?
In a sense, much of my research is about boundaries, at different levels. We can think of semantic typology as the study of the boundaries that languages draw in semantic space when mapping meanings onto linguistic forms. The study of sensory words in particular makes salient the boundary between shared human experience and specific cultural preoccupations in shaping language: how do diverse languages express broadly shared sensory experiences in words, and what might the similarities and differences tell us about the roles of human cognition and culture in shaping vocabularies? This line of research also straddles disciplinary boundaries. Understanding how languages express sensory experience connects to questions in psychology, neuroscience and anthropology about how humans perceive and make sense of the world.