​​​​Marc Allassonnière-Tang

Ongoing Projects

EVOGRAM: The role of linguistic and non-linguistic factors in the evolution of nominal classification systems (Funded research project, 166 936 euros, ANR) - Principal Investigator - LINK

This two-year project (2021-2022) is hosted at the DDL (Dynamics of Language) lab in Lyon and aims at building a database on nominal classification systems to identify the factors affecting their evolution.

RELI: Recherche En Linguistique Illustrée [Research In Linguistics Illustrated] (Funded research project, Labex ASLAN, 6000 euros) - Principal Investigator - LINK

This one-year project (2020-2021) contributes to the valorization of science by popularizing research of the ASLAN laboratories in Lyon in the form of short comics and comic strips.

VARIATION, CHANGE AND COMPLEXITY IN LINGUISTIC AND HEALTH-RELATED BEHAVIOURS (Funded research project, IDEXLyon) - Postdoctoral researcher - 16-IDEX-0005 - LINK

This three-year project (2018-2021) of Dan Dediu (DDL) investigates how is the variation in the infrastructure of language and speech patterned between individuals and groups and how does it affect linguistic diversity.

WHAT UNDERLIES LINGUISTIC CLASSIFICATION?

(Funded research project, Swedish Research Council) - Analyst - VR-2019-02967 - LINK

This three-year project (2020-2022) of Gerd Carling (Lund University) aims at investigating gender assignment, stability, and change from a cross-linguistic, historical, and cultural evolutionary perspective.

LES PARLERS DU CROISSANT (Funded research project, ANR) - Analyst - ANR-17-CE27-0001-01

This five-year project (2016-2020) of Nicolas Quint (LLACAN) aims at providing a multidisciplinary approach (linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, among others) to endangered local varieties of Oïl and Occitan on the Northern Fringe of the Massif Central in France.

FIELDLING (Funded international school in linguistic fieldwork) - Organising committee - LINK 

FieldLing has been organised on a yearly basis since 2010 (involved units of the CNRS: LLACAN, SEDYL, LACITO). It is at present the only regular (and free) intensive training program in France preparing students to study theories, methods, and the use of technological tools for language description through fieldwork.

PRINCIPAL WORD EMBEDDING (Non-funded cooperative initiative) - Analyst - LINK

Natural language processing has been highly influenced by deep learning and continuous representation of words known as word vectors. This project uses principal component analysis to improve the efficiency of word vectors extraction from both raw and annotated corpora of languages such as French, Swedish, and Swahili.

Completed Projects

THE ORIGIN OF CLASSIFIERS (Funded research project, MOST) - Analyst - MOST106-2410-H-004-106-MY3

This three-year project (2017-2019) of One-Soon Her (NCCU) investigates the diachronic development of classifiers in languages of the world by evaluating the likelihood of various existing hypotheses through qualitative syntactic analyses and phylogenetic methods.

LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY (Funded PhD project, Uppsala University) - PhD student -  UFV-PA 2016/536

This thesis under the supervision of Michael Dunn (Uppsala University) and Christine Lamarre (INALCO) uses functional analyses and computational methods to address the lack of arbitrariness of nominal classification systems in terms of synchronic statistical universals and diachronic language evolution.

GIS FOR LANGUAGE STUDY (Funded research environment, Uppsala University) - Coordinator - LINK

This project of Alexandra Petrulevich (Uppsala University) undertakes a series of seminars and workshops from 2017 to 2019 to explore the analytical tools provided by Geographic Information Systems such as QGIS, thereby giving the faculty's research on location-based materials a lift. 

NUMERALS AND CLASSIFIERS (Funded research project, MOST) - Analyst - MOST104-2410-H004-164-MY3

This three-year project (2015-2018) of One-Soon Her (NCCU) provides a typological study of numeral bases and numeral classifiers in the Indo-European language family and other European languages by assessing the interaction between grammatical number, numeral systems, and classifiers.

CLASSIFIERS AND COGNITION (Funded research project, MOST) - Assistant -  MOST103-2410-H004-136-MY

This three-year project (2014-2017) of One-Soon Her (NCCU) investigated the cognitive mechanism and neural correlates underlying the convergence and divergence of sortal classifiers and mensural classifiers in Chinese. The experiments involved the use of fMRI, priming tasks, and numerical stroop tasks.

PHONOTACTIC CONSTRAINTS (Funded research project, NSC) - Assistant - NSC102-2410-H004-080

This two-year project (2012-2014) of Yuchau E. Hsiao (NCCU) established corpora of five Chinese dialects and investigated through the framework of optimality theory the role of phonotactics in syllable contraction and the common patterns of the contracted forms.

WORD ORDER OF CLASSIFIERS (Funded research project, NSC) - Assistant -  NSC101-2410-H004-184-MY3

This three-year project (2012-2015) of One-Soon Her (NCCU) investigated the universal principles underlying the word orders and the internal structure of numerals and classifier constructions. The analysis focused on 214 classifier languages from Sinitic, Miao-Yao, Austro-Asiatic, Tai- Kadai, Tibeto-Burman, and Indo-Aryan.