Sonia Cristofaro (Collitz Professor)
Sorbonne Université
I am a professor of general linguistics and language typology at Sorbonne University. My research areas include language typology, the study of grammatical change, and the relationship between the two. I also have a background in Ancient Greek. I have worked on the typology of a variety of morphosyntactic phenomena, including subordination, insubordination, grammatical relations, possession, number and person marking. I have also worked on general theoretical and methodological issues in language typology, such as the relationship between typology and language description, the nature of language universals and grammatical categories, semantic maps, and competing motivations. I am currently developing a diachronically oriented approach to language universals (in the typological sense of statistically significant cross-linguistic regularities), which I call source-oriented typology. In this approach, the distributional patterns described by individual universals are accounted for in light of different source constructions and developmental mechanisms that give rise to the pattern from one language to another, rather than the synchronic properties of the pattern in itself. This is an evolutionary approach that aims to combine the results of typological research with findings from grammaticalization studies and studies of language change in general.