My scientific interests belong to Tocharian Studies (concerned with an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family, known from 1st-Millennium manuscripts found in the Buddhist cave temples of the Tarim Basin, modern North-West China), and especially to structural changes observable in Tocharian and its linguistic neighbours due to language contact.  

My current project explores one morphosyntactic phenomenon attested to a different extent in several Tarim Basin languages: This is a pattern when a suffix is shared by two or more coordinated words instead of being repeated with each of them (as if we could say ‘cat- and dog-s’ for ‘cats and dogs’). Suffix sharing is mainly known from modern Turkish under the term Suspended Affixation; otherwise, it seems to be rare and its actual spread across languages remains understudied.  

I aim to gather textual attestations of suffix sharing in different Tarim Basin languages and to establish to what extent this syntactic mechanism was acceptable in them and what characteristics it had. My research will bridge up data from the Tarim Basin languages with the modern typological discussion on Suspended Affixation and contribute to underrepresented studies on morphosyntactic parallels in this linguistic area. 

The Daphne Jackson Fellowship is a unique opportunity for me to implement this project while maintaining my caring responsibilities and being technically and professionally retrained after a five-year break.