Frederic Blum
Postdoc
Abteilung für Sprach- und Kulturevolution
Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig
Telefon: +49 (0) 341 3550 269
E-Mail:
frederic_blum@[>>> Please remove the text! <<<]eva.mpg.de
About me
I am a computational linguist working at the intersection of historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and machine learning, with a focus on developing data-driven methodology to address questions about language change, genealogical classification, and the origins of cross-linguistic variation. A central topic in my research is the development of computational methods for historical linguistics. This includes the automation of traditional approaches as well as the development of methods that go beyond the traditional comparative method. One key area of research involves the genealogical classification of languages and the issue of what counts as proof of genealogical relatedness. I am particularly interested in the history of Amazonian languages, including both reconstructions of language families and their phylogenetic analysis. In linguistic typology, I am interested in the application of Bayesian methodology to study variation in the domains of the lexicon as well as constraints on phonological features in the languages of the world.
Curriculum Vitae
| 2026 - ongoing | Post-Doc at MPI-EVA |
| 2022 - 2026 | Doctoral studies at MPI-EVA and University of Passau |
| 2019-2022 | Master of Arts in Linguistics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Master's thesis: "Initial lengthening of consonants in 25 typologically diverse languages" |
| 2018-2018 | Exchange student (DAAD Scholarship) at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru |
| 2015-2019 | Bachelor of Arts at Freie Universität Berlin in Language and Society (major) and Spanish Philology (minor) Bachelor's thesis: "Syntactic nominalization in Quechua" |
Publications & Presentations
Blum, Frederic and Paschen, Ludger. Lengthening at domain boundaries Talk presented at the workshop for Spoken- and Signed-language Corpus Studies in Linguistic Typology located at the 14th Conference of the Association or Linguistic Typology. Austin, USA, on 15-17 December, 2022
Blum, Frederic and Barrientos Ugarte, Carlos and Poirier, Zoe and Ingunza, Adriano. 2021. Una aproximación filolingüística a la clasificación interna del Quechua. Talk at the 5th reunion of the Red para el Estudio de las Lenguas Andinas (RELA), Tübingen, 12.09.2021.
Lehmann, Nico, Frederic Blum, and Elisabeth Verhoeven. 2021. "The collaborative Yucatec Maya corpus Cocoyum: A model corpus architecture for indigenous language corpus collections." Talk presented at the 7th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC). http://hdl.handle.net/10125/74447