I am a diachronic typologist. I
use phylogenetic comparative methods to study typological diversity and
change within language families, including the Indo-European,
Austronesian, and Niger-Congo language families. My main domains of
interest are typology and historical linguistics, especially research
that provides a synthesis of these two linguistic subfields.
- Postdoctoral research associate, Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany (2016– )
- Postdoctoral research associate, Reading Evolutionary Biology Group, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom (2012-2016)
- PhD "The evolutionary dynamics of motion event encoding", Evolutionary Processes in Language and Culture group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands (2009-2012)
- BA and MA in Linguistics, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands (2004-2009)
Currently I am working on Bantu noun classes, numeral systems in Vanuatu/Oceanic, and negative existentials in Indo-European.
Recent publications- Kolipakam, Vishnupriya, Jordan, Fiona M., Dunn, Michael, Greenhill, Simon J., Bouckaert, Remco, Gray, Russell D. & Verkerk, Annemarie. (2018). A Bayesian phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family. Royal Society Open Science 5: 171504.
- Soroli, E. and Verkerk, A. 2017. Motion events in Greek: Methodological and typological issues. CogniTextes vol. 15. available at: http://journals.openedition.org/cognitextes/889
- Verkerk, A. 2017. The goal-over-source principle in Indo-European: Preliminary results from a parallel corpus study. In S. Luraghi, T. Nikitina and C. Zanchi (eds.), Space in diachrony (pp. 1-40). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
- Verkerk, A. 2017. Phylogenies: Future, not fallacy. Book review of Pereltsvaig and Lewis (2015), “The Indo-European controversy: Facts and fallacies in historical linguistics”. Language Dynamics and Change 7(1): 127-140.
- Calude, Andreea S., & Verkerk, Annemarie. 2016. The typology and diachrony of higher numerals in Indo-European: a phylogenetic comparative study. Journal of Language Evolution: lzw003.
- Bentz, C., Verkerk, A., Kiela, D., Hill, F., and Buttery, P. (2015). Adaptive languages: Modeling the co-evolution of population structure and lexical diversity. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0128254.
- Verkerk, A. (2015). Where do all the motion verbs come from? The speed of development of manner verbs and path verbs in Indo-European. Diachronica, 32(1): 69-104.