Silva Nurmio

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. My work deals with grammatical number (e.g. singular vs. plural) which is a field that encompasses morphology, syntax and semantics. In my MPhil and doctoral theses I focused on Welsh (Celtic, Indo-European), with comparative work with the other Celtic languages. Already in this work I was also interested in the typological context of Welsh and the Celtic languages: how their grammatical number systems compare with those of other languages of the world, and what the Celtic languages can add to our existing knowledge of them. My current postdoctoral project has a primarily typological focus: I look at singulatives (derived noun forms meaning 'one' or 'unit') cross-linguistically, building the first ever database of this phenomenon and studying in which kinds of number systems singulatives can be found and what this tells us about the expression of number in general, as well as other related phenomena such as the mass/count distinction.