Maria Khachaturyan

I am a postdoc at the Department of Cultures. My main descriptive focus is the Mano ethnic group and their language (400,000 speakers in Guinea and Liberia). I have being doing fieldwork among the Mano people since 2009. In 2015, I published a grammar of Mano. I am interested in linguistic documentation, (historical) syntax, typology, and the study of deictic categories, specifically, temporal and spatial/cognitive deixis, in the interactional context. My current project in linguistics focuses on the relationship between language contact and multilingualism through a detailed study of variation in L1 and L2 performance in Mano. In my current project in linguistic anthropology I study the linguistic performance of the Mano Catholic community, including spontaneous Bible translation and the role that common ground plays in linguistic practices of a religious community in a broader context of religious conversion. I am also working on a comparative project focusing on language change fueled by Christianization and translation of ecclesiastic texts. The latter project is supported by a grant from the Fyssen foundation, France and by a grant from the Academy of Finland.

I earned my PhD in Linguistics, summa cum laude, from INaLCO, Paris, France, in 2014, my MA in Sociology from Collège Universitaire Français, Moscow, Russia, in 2011, my MA and BA in Linguistics from Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, in 2010. From 2015 to 2017 I was a postdoc at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley.