Martin Haspelmath

Martin Haspelmath ( born February 2, 1963 in Hoya ) is a German linguist.

Life

Haspelmath 1983-1985 studied at the University of Vienna and 1985-1987 at the University of Cologne Indo-European Studies, General Linguistics and Slavic. In 1988 he graduated from the University at Buffalo his MA degree in Linguistics, 1989, his master's degree in Slavic Studies at the University of Cologne. After a year abroad at the Lomonosov University in Moscow 1990-1996 he worked at the Free University of Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1996 and his Habilitation in 1993.

Since 1998, Haspelmath is employed at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, as well as working as an adjunct professor of linguistics at the University of Leipzig.

Haspelmath is a nephew of the organ builder Martin Haspelmath.

Research

Research priorities are Haspelmaths syntactic theory, morphology, language contact and language change, and language typology. An important project under his direction was the creation of the World Atlas of Language Structures ( WALS ), which was released in 2005 and is also accessible online. Furthermore initiated Haspelmath the linguistic Online Encyclopedia Glottopedia.

Awards

• Academy Award 2007 of the Berlin- Brandenburg Academy of Sciences