Matthew Baerman - Biography#

Matthew Baerman's first degree (B.A, Yale 1984) and PhD (UC Berkeley 1999) were in Slavic Linguistics, with a seven year interlude spent in the study (M.Arch., Harvard 1990) and practice of architecture. The intricacies of Slavic morphology served as a gateway to his interest in morphological systems more generally, and he started as a research fellow at the University of Surrey in 1999, where he reached the rank of Professor in 2022. His work has focused on the typology, diachrony and analysis of inflectional morphology, concentrating on those patterns which seem to deviate from their putative task of expressing meaning, and instead display their own system-internal logic. This has involved (i) extensive cross-linguistic typological surveys involving hundreds of languages, the results of which have been reported in publicly accessible databases, books, and journal articles, and (ii) detailed case studies of individual languages, involving both close analysis and, most often, diachronic reconstruction of the origin and development of the patterns. He has devoted article-length studies to languages from the following families: Nilotic, North Omotic, Kadu, Oto-Manguean, Finnic, Slavic, and the Mexican isolate Seri. He has been a co-applicant in over a dozen major funded research projects, and in the last eight years has been Principal Investigator on five projects, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and the Leverhulme Trust, amounting to a value of £1,884,234 and involving collaboration with the CNRS, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the University of Edinburgh. A particular focus of the last few years has been the West Nilotic language Nuer, spoken primarily in South Sudan, a language with a large speaker community (some millions), but little researched and with almost no resources. Alongside various academic publications, he and his colleagues have produced an online dictionary, as well as original children’s stories, the first ever to have been published in this language.