Annika TjukaMax Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology | EVA · Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Annika Tjuka
Master of Arts
About
14
Publications
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Introduction
My main goal is to answer questions about linguistic diversity with a focus on language variation in word meanings. I submitted my PhD dissertation to the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in August 2023. I currently hold a postdoc position at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. I am a language scientist studying patterns and causes of words with multiple meanings. For my work, I use data from language documentation, large-scale databases, and computational methods.
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
September 2019 - August 2022
April 2019 - August 2019
June 2018 - March 2019
Education
October 2016 - March 2019
October 2013 - September 2016
Publications
Publications (14)
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/
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...
Intonation is a means of structuring discourse and one of its functions is to highlight new or contrasting information, i.e., focus. Speakers of different languages use a range of prosodic cues to mark focus. Compared to non-tonal languages such as English, tonal languages use pitch to distinguish lexical tones and focus marking. Determining the in...
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...
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...
