
Annika TjukaMax Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology | EVA · Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Annika Tjuka
Doctor of Philosophy
About
22
Publications
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Introduction
My main goal is to explore linguistic diversity, especially the variations of word meanings across languages. I integrate findings from linguistics and psychology in my research and adopt a computational approach. I received my doctorate with highest honors (summa cum laude) from Friedrich Schiller University Jena in March 2024 and I am working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
September 2019 - August 2022
April 2019 - August 2019
June 2018 - March 2019
Education
September 2019 - March 2024
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Field of study
- Linguistics
October 2016 - March 2019
October 2013 - September 2016
Publications
Publications (22)
Psychologists and linguists collect various data on word and concept properties. In psychology, scholars have accumulated norms and ratings for a large number of words in languages with many speakers. In linguistics, scholars have accumulated cross-linguistic information about the relations between words and concepts. Until now, however, there have...
Terms for body parts can denote other referents outside the semantic domain of the human body. Different meanings are connected with the term for the body part ‘face’ in different languages and these semantic extensions provide insight into the principles that lead to the connection of multiple meanings to a single term. The present study investiga...
This letter addresses two issues in language research that are important to cognitive science: the comparability of word meanings across languages and the neglect of an integrated approach to writing systems. The first issue challenges generativist claims by emphasizing the importance of comparability of data, drawing on typologists' findings about...
Every human has a body. Yet, languages differ in how they divide the body into parts to name them. While universal naming strategies exist, there is also variation in the vocabularies of body parts across languages. In this study, we investigate the similarities and differences in naming two separate body parts with one word, i.e., colexifications....
Many languages have words that denote a human body part and an object, for example, hand, which refers to a part of a person and a watch. As of yet, there is no systematic study on the distribution of these shared names, i.e., colexifications, between two concrete semantic domains in a variety of languages. Here, I present a study that investigates...
Expressions in which the word for a body part is also used for objects can be found in many languages. Some languages use body part terms to refer to object parts, while others have only a few idiosyncratic examples in their vocabulary. Studying the word forms referring to body and object concepts, i.e., colexifications, across languages, offers in...
Intonation is an instrument for structuring discourse and emphasizing different types of information. In German, for example, pitch is used to highlight focus, while in Vietnamese, different pitch contours distinguish lexical tones. As of yet, the interplay between intonation and lexical tone in relation to information structure has not been suffic...
Intonation is an instrument for structuring discourse and emphasizing different types of information. In German, for example, pitch is used to highlight focus, while in Vietnamese, different pitch contours distinguish lexical tones. As of yet, the interplay between intonation and lexical tone in relation to information structure has not been suffic...
Expressions in which the word for a body part is also used for objects can be found in many languages. Some languages use body part terms to refer to object parts, while others have only a few idiosyncratic examples in their vocabulary. Studying the word forms referring to body and object concepts, i.e., colexifications, across languages, offers in...
Global services like navigation, communication, and Earth observation have increased dramatically in the 21st century due to advances in outer space industries. But as orbits become increasingly crowded with both satellites and inevitable space debris pollution, continued operations become endangered by the heightened risks of debris collisions in...
Every human has a body. Yet, languages differ in how they divide the body into parts to name them. While universal naming strategies exist, there is also variation in the vocabularies of body parts across languages. In this study, we investigate the similarities and differences in naming two separate body parts with the same word, i.e., colexificat...
Language comparison requires user-friendly tools that facilitate the standardization of linguistic data. We present two resources built on the basis of a standardized cross-linguistic format and show how the data is curated and extended. The first resource, the Concepticon, is a reference catalog for standardized concepts from linguistic research....
Posters are available here: https://annikatjuka-talks.github.io/
This article details a correction to the article: Tjuka, A., Nguyen, H. T. T., & Spalek, K. (2020). Foxes, deer, and hedgehogs: The recall of focus alternatives in Vietnamese. 'Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology', 11(1), 16. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.253.
Cross-linguistic studies of concepts provide valuable insights for the investigation of the mental lexicon. Recent developments of cross-linguistic databases facilitate an exploration of a diverse set of languages on the basis of comparative concepts. These databases make use of a well-established reference catalog, the Concepticon, which is built...
In tonal languages, the role of intonation in information-structuring has yet to be fully investigated. Intuitively, one would expect intonation to play only a small role in expressing communicative functions. However, experimental studies with Vietnamese native speakers show that intonation contours vary across different contexts and are used to m...
Psychologists and linguists have collected a great diversity of data for word and concept properties. In psychology, many studies accumulate norms and ratings such as word frequencies or age-of-acquisition often for a large number of words. Linguistics, on the other hand, provides valuable insights into relations of word meanings. We present a coll...
Primary data from small, low-resource languages of Oceania have only recently become available through language documentation. In our study, we explore corpus data of five Oceanic languages of Melanesia which are known to be mood-prominent (in the sense of Bhat, 1999). In order to find out more about tense, aspect, modality, and polarity, we tagged...
The Oceanic languages of Melanesia are generally small, low-resource languages, of which very little primary data is available. For our study on tense, aspect, and modality (TAM), we have access to richly annotated corpora from seven endangered Oceanic languages. In this paper, we describe some of the methods we used to investigate the category of...
Thus far, the cognitive basis of the mapping of body-part terms to object and landscape featureshas not been fully explored. Lakoff & Johnson (1980) declare that metaphors are pervasive in everyday life, and therefore, represent cognitive units which are responsible for the structuring, storage, and processing of information (concepts). However, th...
In my bachelor thesis I have dealt with the question, how texts are triggered by the readers emotions. In a first, theoretical part, I discussed the various approaches and theories from linguistics and psychology. Studies in psychology (see Kissler et al. 2007, Bayer/Sommer/Schacht 2011) show that even individual words cause emotional reactions. In...