Centre for General Linguistics

Axel Holvoet, distinguished professor

I am a functional linguist working on problems of grammatical semantics, the syntax-semantics interface and historical syntax, usually with a special emphasis on the Baltic and Slavonic languages. The topics I have been interested in over recent years include the middle voice, the functions of irrealis moods, non-directive imperatives, quotativity and echoic use, and most recently the Talmyan typology of event conflation. At Vilnius University I have headed two international research projects funded by the Research Council of Lithuania, on the syntax-semantics interface in Baltic (2012–2015) and on verbal grams in Baltic (2018–2021) respectively.

My recent research topics include the middle voice, non-directive imperatives, the irrealis controversy and the category of mood. In earlier years I have also worked on case marking and grammatical relations, definiteness, verbal aspect, modality, echoic use and other subjects.

Vladimir Panov, associate professor

I am a scholar in linguistic typology and general linguistics. The sphere of my research interests covers such topics as the typology of grammatical categories of the verb, the typology of discourse particles, boundaries between morphology, syntax and discourse, language-particular description of grammatical and discourse phenomena, the areal typology of Eurasia. In my research, I combine the traditional Greenbergian typology based on comparative concepts with elements of multivariate typology, but I am also interested in constructionist usage-based approaches and, recently, practice-oriented frameworks of linguistic anthropology.

I have fieldwork experience studying the living Greek dialects of Italy (Salento) and the Buriat language.

My last personal project (a postdoctoral study, 2018-2020) was devoted to the study of areal patterns of distribution of discourse particles in Eurasia. More recently, I have been involved in “The Baltic verb” project studying aspects of the grammar of the Lithuanian verb in a typological context.

Alexandre Cremers, associate professor

I am a linguist working on semantics and pragmatics. My research focuses on phenomena at the interface between linguistic meaning and general reasoning, in particular questions, implicatures, and vagueness. My work combines psycholinguistic approaches, traditional formal approaches inspired by logic, and probabilistic / game-theoretic modeling.

My last project “Efficient communication under uncertainty: Vagueness and Implicatures” studied how we manage to communicate efficiently using vague terms such as 'tall' or 'far', and how vagueness interacts with our ability to figure out the speaker's intentions.

I occasionally work on language acquisition, more specifically how children learn to decypher pragmatic meaning.

Anna Daugavet, assistant professor

I have studied areal parallels in the development of phonological and grammatical categories in Baltic, Finnic and Slavonic languages. I have done research on tone and stress patterns and syllable weight, as well as their interaction with vowel and consonant changes. Since these features are often used in classification of dialects, my work also touches upon issues of dialect history. My current interests lie with verbal categories as they are reflected in monolingual and parallel text corpora, especially the expression of aspectual and modal meanings.

Danguolė Kotryna Kapkan, PhD student

I am currently working on my PhD thesis, dealing with peripheral perfects in the European languages. My main research interests lie with linguistic typology, grammatical semantics, grammaticalization, corpus linguistics, linguistic variation, Lithuanian, Italian, and the dialects of Southern Italy. In my work, I try to combine qualitative and quantitative research methods while being conscious not only of the cross-linguistic, but also of the intra-linguistic variation. Previously, I studied English and Portuguese languages at the University of Bari, Italy (BA), and then General Linguistics at the University of Vilnius (MA), where I decided to stay for my PhD, after doing a couple of study semesters abroad in Antwerp, Belgium, and Lisbon, Portugal.

Ignas Rudaitis, PhD student

I am interested in applying mathematics of language to help elucidate the nature of human cognition. To me, foremostly, this means using formal language theory (FLT) to inquire into implicit learning, as well as the inductive biases that endow it with its distinctive shape, shared by our biological species. Before my PhD years, I applied this approach to some issues of phonotactics. Currently, I am working on my thesis, titled “Doing syntax with unordered representations: focus on recursion”.

Yelyzaveta Drach, PhD student

I am working on my PhD thesis called The Middle and the Lexicon. A study in the lexical input of middle constructions on the basis of Ukrainian, French and English data at Vilnius University. In this work I will try to carry out a contrastive analysis of the middle, also called facilitative middle, taking into account data from corpora and questionnaires. I will focus on three languages belonging to different genera. Previously, I studied French and English languages at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine (BA), and then Communicative strategies in French and English, also at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine (MA).