Eva-Marie Bloom Ström
About Eva-Marie Bloom Ström
Researcher and university lecturer
PhD in African languages 2013 (University of Gothenburg); Associate Professor/Reader since 2020.
Senior Research Associate at Rhodes University, South Africa
Research
I am interested in how language can be structured based on the intents of the speaker and on the speaker’s assumptions regarding the listener’s pre-existing knowledge. This is called information structure and is especially important in languages with a flexible sentence structure such as the Bantu languages. In my analyses, I use the function of language as a starting point and put it in a typological perspective. I’m also interested in how we got to where we are, i.e. the historical background and grammaticalisation. I’m fascinated by variations between languages and dialects and find it important to study languages in their social context.
My current project; Expressing time without verbs: non-verbal copula constructions in Southern Bantu and beyond (VR 2025-01646), analyses grammatical constructions in Southern Bantu and especially Xhosa, in which the noun functions as a predicate, without a verb or auxiliary. The project includes a PhD student, Onelisa Slater.
In collaboration with colleagues in Sweden, I have started The network for underexplored linguistic diversity in order to promote research on endangered languages. This network has resulted in a large project, financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (M25-0092), in which I am one of the participating researchers: Unexplored language phenomena (UNLAP): Identifying,documenting, and explaining the outer reaches of human expressive capacity.
I base my research on data collected through fieldwork. Especially when starting from scratch with a language or specific construction, elicitation is a useful method. Mostly, however, I use recorded and transcribed natural speech in my analyses, as I am above all interested in how language is actually used. This includes recorded narratives, dialogues and procedural descriptions. I’m interested in using a variety of methods in my fieldwork and have an ambition to continuously improve myself when it comes to e.g. ethical considerations, archiving and metadata.
The recorded conversations and other linguistic material from various locations in the Eastern Cape has now been turned into a unique searchable corpus, with transcribed and annotated spoken language.
Earlier projects
During 2025 I finished a research project, funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR 2021-03125), called How do words get in order? The role of speaker-hearer interaction in languages of southern Africa. The project studied grammatical constructions in relation to meaning and information structure. It is a follow-up of a previous research project on information structure and word order in Bantu (VR 2017-01811), or, more precisely, how the verb phrase and word order contribute to the expression of definiteness.
After finishing my PhD, I obtained an international postdoc position hosted by Rhodes University, situated in Grahamstown in the heartland of the Xhosa-speaking area. The aim of my postdoc project was to describe and analyse morpho-syntactic microvariation in the dialect cluster of Xhosa, a Bantu language of South Africa.
Education and supervision
I teach field methods, various linguistics courses, Swahili, Xhosa/Zulu and a course titled Language & Society in Africa. I supervise two doctoral students, and co-supervise one doctoral student. All describe and document underresourced languages.
Background
MA in African languages 1993 (Leiden University, the Netherlands). My MA thesis analysed number formation in Burunge, a Southern Cushitic language spoken outside Kondoa, Tanzania. My PhD thesis is a grammatical description of Ndengeleko, focusing on phonology and the morphology of verb and noun phrases. It is the first linguistic study of Ndengeleko and includes a survey of the sociolinguistic situation of the region, with a discussion of the endangerment of the language. The study shows that the language is rapidly being replaced by the dominant language of the region, Swahili. Before embarking on my PhD, I worked in the Netherlands for 17 years, mainly with adult education and IT. I also lived in England for 2 years and in South Africa for 3 years. I grew up in Sollerön, Sweden.
Upcoming publication
Crane, Thera, Eva-Marie Bloom Ström, Lotta Aunio, Msuswa P. Mabena and Onelisa Slater. Accepted. Saying ‘more than usual’ by saying less than usual: Utterance-final conjoint forms in Xhosa and Southern Ndebele. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics.