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Department of Comparative Language Science

Alexandru Craevschi

Alexandru Craevschi

PhD Student

Quantitative Diachronic Linguistics Group

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I am a PhD candidate in Chundra Cathcart’s Quantitative Diachronic Linguistics Group. Typology and historical linguistics are the two fields of linguistics that I am most interested in and most experienced with. More concretely, I like working on methodology, mostly quantitative methods that include but are not limited to: NLP, phylogenetic methods, Bayesian statistical modelling and corpus-based methods. For my master thesis I developed a model that predicts the pre- or post-verbal placement of non-subject constituents in the languages of Western Asia that accounts for non-independence of languages in terms of their genetic affiliation and contact relationships.

 

At the moment, our group is focused on modelling analogical change, as this important language change process remains relatively under-researched from a computational perspective when compared to sound change. As Sturtevant's paradox suggests, analogical change is a less regular process than sound change, hence the use of probabilistic methods is justified to determine the variables and scenarios that make analogical change more likely to occur. We will mostly be working with Indo-European languages, as these have a well-documented history and make it possible to compare models’ predictions to what classical historical linguists have worked out but we will try to make models as generalizable as possible beyond the IE.

 

I like open science and despite my modest contributions, I am developing a habit of publishing my code and data whenever it is possible. If you are interested in the work that I do, please take a look at my GitHub page. I cannot promise the cleanest of codes (working on it!) but I would gladly answer any questions you have about it.