 Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig
Tel.: +49 (341) 3550 - 307
Fax: +49 (341) 3550 - 333
 Email: haspelmath eva.mpg.de
 Personal Homepage
Martin Haspelmath is the second most senior scientist in the linguistics department of MPI-EVA. He studied linguistics in Vienna, Cologne, Buffalo and Moscow, and received his Ph.D. and habilitation degrees from the Freie Universität Berlin. Before moving to Leipzig in 1998, he worked at the Otto-Friedrichs-Universität Bamberg and the Università degli Studi di Pavia.
His research interests in linguistics are primarily in broadly comparative and historical morphology and syntax as well as language contact. He started out with a focus on European languages ("The European linguistic area", 2001), in particular Lezgian (A grammar of Lezgian, 1993), but more recently he sees himself as a generalist whose primary concern is the discovery and explanation of linguistic universals (The World Atlas of Language Structures, 2005; "Parametric versus functional explanation of syntactic universals", to appear 2007).
Research Projects:
Loanword Typology: Comparative Study of Lexical Borowability
In this project, we study lexical borrowing patterns in 40 languages from around the world. Each language is the responsibility of a single author, an expert of the language and what is known about its history and its contact languages. For each language, we assemble lexical data for a fixed list of 1460 meanings. [more]
Ditransitive constructions in the world's languages
In this project, we are studying the grammatical properties of ditransitive constructions (i.e. constructions with an agent, a recipient, and a theme argument) in a broadly comparative perspective. We are compiling a database with relevant information on about 200 languages, and we plan to publish this database as well as a monograph that presents the results of our inquiries. [more]
Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures
APiCS gathers comparable synchronic data on the grammatical and lexical structures of a large number of pidgin and creole languages. In the first volume of the atlas, the data will be presented in the form of maps. The second volume (the encyclopedic companion volume) will contain sociohistorical and grammatical surveys of each language. [more]
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]
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