Tatiana Nikitina is a linguist conducting research into semantics, historical-comparative linguistics, formal syntax and linguistic typology. She has made a salient contribution to the study of reported speech. From an areal point of view, her work bears on

Mande languages The Mande languages are spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé peoples and include Maninka, Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Kpelle, Dioula, Bozo, Mende, Susu, and Vai. There are "60 to 75 languages spoken by 30 to 40 million ...

, Turkic languages, and some languages of Europe (Latin, Ancient Greek, Slavic languages...). Nikitina was awarded the CNRS bronze medal in 2017 for her groundbreaking work in general linguistics.

Career

Nikitina studied West African languages and cultures at St Petersburg University, then pursued a PhD at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

(graduating in 2008). She was then a post-doctoral researcher at the TOPOI excellence cluster at Humbold University of Berlin. Nikitina joined

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 ...

in 2013 as a tenured researcher. She was a member of the Language, langues et cultures d'Afrique ( fr) research centre, then of LACITO (Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale). She passed her Habilitation in 2019. From 2018 to 2023, she was the Principal Investigator of a European Research Council project, "Discourse Reporting in African Storytelling", that "explores strategies of discourse reporting characteristic of traditional narratives in African languages, and compares them to discourse reporting strategies attested in a number of Turkic languages spoken in Russia".

Collective responsibilities and commitments

From 2018 to 2023, Nikitina was a member of the Scientific Council of the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (InSHS) of the CNRS. She is one of the signatories of an article published in 2019 about the organization of the CNRS in terms of recruitment and funding. Nikitina is a member of the editorial board of''

Transactions of the Philological Society ''Transactions of the Philological Society'' is a linguistics journal published three times a year by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Philological Society. It has appeared since 1854, making it the oldest scholarly linguistics journal. It is curr ...

'', '' Faits de Langues'' and '' Language in Africa'', and a member of the Scientific committee of the '' Journal of African Languages and Literatures (JALaLit)''. From 2018 to 2021, she was Review Editor for ''

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 ...

''.

Distinctions

Nikitina received in 2017 the bronze medal of CNRS "in recognition of the diversity of approaches, languages and linguistic phenomena covered by her work".

Publications

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Notes and references

Living people Women linguists Stanford University alumni French National Centre for Scientific Research scientists Semanticists Syntacticians Linguists of Turkic languages Year of birth missing (living people) {{Improve categories, date=July 2023