Martin Haspelmath (; born 2 February 1963 in Hoya,

Lower Saxony Lower Saxony (german: Niedersachsen ; nds, Neddersassen; stq, Läichsaksen) is a German state (') in northwestern Germany. It is the second-largest state by land area, with , and fourth-largest in population (8 million in 2021) among the 16 ...

) is a German

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

working in the field of

linguistic typology Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the co ...

. He is a researcher at the

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (german: Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie, shortened to MPI EVA) is a research institute based in Leipzig, Germany, that was founded in 1997. It is part of the Max Plan ...

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

, where he worked from 1998 to 2015 and again since 2020. Between 2015 and 2020, he worked at the

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (german: Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte) performs basic research into archaeological science. The institute is one of 80+ research institutes of the Max Planck Society and ...

. He is also an honorary professor of linguistics at the

University of Leipzig Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 Decemb ...

Career

Haspelmath is one of the editors of the

World Atlas of Language Structures The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-ROM i ...

and the

Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute for ...

online database, one of the founders of the open access publisher

Language Science Press Language Science Press (LSP) is an open access scholarly publishing house specializing in linguistics, formally set up in 2014. Language Science Press publishes books on a central storage and archiving server in combination with print on-demand ...

, and has worked on the

Standard Average European Standard Average European (SAE) is a concept introduced in 1939 by American linguist Benjamin Whorf to group the modern Indo-European languages of Europe with shared common features. Whorf argued that the SAE languages were characterized by a numb ...

sprachbund A sprachbund (, lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. The lang ...

. Besides typology, his research interests include

syntactic In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), ...

and morphological theory,

language change Language change is variation over time in a language's features. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics. Traditional theories of historical linguistics identify ...

and

language contact Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for th ...

. He is a member of the

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europea ...

. According to

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

, his work has been cited over 32,000 times and he has an

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as winn ...

of 80 ().

Publications

Monographs

* ''A grammar of Lezgian''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993. — 567 pp. — (Mouton Grammar Library, 9) * ''Indefinite pronouns''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. — 364 pp. — (Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory) * ''From space to time: Temporal adverbials in the world’s languages''. Munich & Newcastle: Lincom Europa, 1997. — 181 pp. — (Lincom Studies in Theoretical Linguistics, 3) * ''Understanding morphology''. London: Arnold, 2002. — 290 pp. (second edition: with Andrea D. Sims, London: Hodder Education, 2010, — 366 pp.)

Edited volumes

* ''Converbs in cross-linguistic perspective: structure and meaning of adverbial verb forms — adverbial participles, gerunds'' / Ed. by Martin Haspelmath & Ekkehard König. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. — 565 pp. — (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology, 13) * ''Language typology and language universals: An international handbook'' / Ed. by Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher and Wolfgang Raible. Vol. 1-2. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001. — 1856 pp. * ''Coordinating constructions'' / Ed. by Martin Haspelmath. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. — 576 pp. — (Typological Studies in Language, 58) * ''The World Atlas of Language Structures'' / Ed. by Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. — 695 pp. * ''Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook'' / Ed. by Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009. — 1081 pp. * ''Studies in Ditransitive Constructions: A Comparative Handbook'' / Ed. by Andrej Malchukov, Martin Haspelmath and Bernard Comrie. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 2010. — 772 pp.

References

External links

* 1963 births Living people People from Nienburg (district) Linguists from Germany Members of Academia Europaea Linguists of Caucasian languages Linguists of Northeast Caucasian languages Morphologists Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology {{germany-linguist-stub