 David Gil
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig
Tel.: +49 (341) 3550 - 321
Fax: +49 (341) 3550 - 333
 Email: gil eva.mpg.de
Personal Homepage: http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/
David Gil has a BSc in mathematics from MIT, an MA in linguistics from Tel Aviv University, and a PhD in linguistics from UCLA; his 1982 PhD dissertation was titled "Distributive Numerals". He has held teaching positions at Tel Aviv University (1982-1989), Haifa University (1990-1992), National University of Singapore (1992-1995) and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (1996-1998), before joining the Max Planck Institute in 1998. David's interests are in grammar, cognition, and linguistic typology, with a focus on field work in Indonesia. He is the director of the MPI Jakarta Field Station, at which a variety of research projects are being conducted, in language documentation, language contact, language acquisition, language and thought, and figurative language. He is also interested in areal linguistics, and was one of the coeditors of the World Atlas of Language Structures.
Research Projects:
The World Atlas of Language Structures - WALS
In 2005, the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) was published as a book and CD-ROM. Based on a core sample of 200 languages, WALS documents the geographical distribution of approximately 120 structural features in the world’s languages. WALS for the first time permits the rapid assessment of the areal spread of a wide range of linguistic features. [more]
Acquisition of Jakarta Indonesian
The goal of the Acquisition Project was to record, transcribe, and enter into a computerized database, a corpus of naturalistic data from a large sample of Jakarta Indonesian child language. [more]
Figurative Language: Cross-Linguistic, Cross-Cultural and Cognitive Aspects
The goal of the project is to conduct a systematic in-depth analysis, from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, of the linguistic and psychological aspects involved in the use of figurative language, focussing on expressions such as, but not limited to, metaphors, similes, oxymorons, analogies, proverbs and idioms. [more]
Language and Thought: Universality and Relativism
Almost anybody who has taken part in interactions between native English speakers and Indonesian speakers has had occasion to observe striking differences in how people from both groups deal with the notion of time: how they conceive time, how they value time, and how they plan and execute their activities in time. In this project, we plan to study a variety of conceptual categories which are encoded in significantly different fashion in English and in Indonesian. [more]
Language Contact in Indonesia
Nearly 800 languages are spoken in Indonesia, in addition to Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), the national language. The great majority of Indonesians are therefore proficient in at least two languages, their local home language and Indonesian. This makes Indonesia an ideal location in which to study language contact. [more]
Linguistic Field Work in Riau Province, Indonesia
When I first travelled to Riau province in Indonesia, all I knew about the region was what I had read in one place or another. The population was reported to be mostly ethnically Malay: for example, the Routledge atlas paints the entire province in a solid homogeneous yellow, standing for Malay. And the local dialect, together with that of the neighbouring Malaysian province of Johor, was reputed to be that which formed the basis for the standardization of Malay/Indonesian, the so-called "Johor-Riau Malay". [more]
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