Malin Petzell

Professor

Department of Languages and Literatures

Telephone

+46 31-786 19 47

Mail

malin.petzell@sprak.gu.se

Visiting address

Renströmsgatan 6

41255 Göteborg

Postal address

Box 200

40530 Göteborg

About Malin Petzell

Background

I am a linguist and Professor of African languages. My research primarily focuses on verbs in Tanzanian Bantu languages, but I am also interested in under-described languages in general and Bantu languages in particular. My research interests include language description (documentation and analysis), nominal and verbal morphosyntax, aspectual classification of verbs, and field methods. I have previously served as the Coordinator for the Teacher Education Programme (2014-2018), Assistant Head of department for Doctoral studies (2018-2020), and Assistant Dean responsible for research (2021-2022).

My current research project Eating, praying, but not "loving"? deals with actionality in Kutu and Kwere (see description below). I am also one of several researchers in the RJ-program Unexplored language phenomena (UNLAP): Identifying, documenting, and explaining the outer reaches of human expressive capacity (more information). The program explores the outer reaches of the human language capacity. It breaks new ground by redirecting the linguistic inquiry towards the discovery and investigation of extraordinary language phenomena that remain undocumented. The world’s linguistic diversity is far from fully charted. Identification and examination of unknown phenomena in the grammars and vocabularies of understudied languages are crucial to our understanding of the full scope – or design space – of the human language faculty.

Research

Current research project

Eating, praying, but not "loving"? Actionality in Kutu and Kwere

Language offers a lens through which we can discern how humans classify the world around them. Theories of language that are based solely on data from well-documented languages can distort our understanding of the potential universal properties of languages and the full extent to which languages can vary. The analysis of data from under-documented languages is thus essential for testing the limits of linguistic theories and how well they account for the linguistic reality. The study of verbs in Bantu languages has already exposed striking variation in the verbal system compared to other language families and, in turn, impacts the way we view, for example, how speakers navigate divisions in the temporal space. The goals of this project are to (i) document and analyse how situations expressed by verbs unfold in time (i.e., actionality) in Kutu and Kwere, two closely related under-documented and endangered East Ruvu Bantu languages spoken in central Tanzania, (ii) assess the extent to which theories of actionality account for the range of systems in these and other Bantu languages, and (iii) develop a data collection tool that can be used for comparative research on actionality not only in Bantu languages, but in languages across the world. This project will be the first comprehensive analysis of actionality in East Ruvu languages. Bringing under-documented languages to the forefront of this research area will help shape our understanding of the possibilities of human language.

My previous research projects:

To break or be broken ‒ A study of valency-decreasing alternations in East Ruvu Bantu languages. (VR)
The semantics of verbal morphology in central Tanzanian Bantu languages: a comparative study (RJ)
An analysis of an endangered language - the Kami in Tanzania (RJ)
Untangling the dialect continuum in the Morogoro region, Tanzania (VR)