I'm a postdoctoral researcher (Wenner-Gren Fellow, funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundations) hosted by the University of Oslo. I work on clausal organisation in Uruangnirin, an Austronesian language of eastern Indonesia. I'm related to the project group Where does grammar come from? I have also collected data on two other Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia: Geser-Gorom and Yamdena. I have a side-project on Dutch multi-ethnolect as it is used in hip hop lyrics.
I'm a member of the Serial Verb Constructions across modalities research group at the University of Amsterdam.
Previously, I worked on Scandinavian prosody in the ExSynOp project at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
My PhD is from Lund University (Sweden), for which I wrote a grammar of Kalamang, a Papuan language of eastern Indonesia and a neighbour language of Uruangnirin. I also made a dictionary and an archive.
New: can language models (like GPT-4) read the Kalamang grammar and translate Kalamang to English and vice versa? I've tested this with Garett Tanzer (Google), Mirac Suzgun (Stanford), Dan Jurafsky (Stanford) and Luke Melas-Kyriazi (Oxford). Humans do better, but models seem promising. Read for yourself: Garrett Tanzer, Mirac Suzgun, Eline Visser, Dan Jurafsky, Luke Melas-Kyriazi. 2023. A Benchmark for Learning to Translate a New Language from One Grammar Book (MTOB). arXiv.
Newer: Google's new AI, Gemini 1.5, seems to do even better than the human in the MTOB-paper. Read more in this tweet.
Email: firstname dot lastname at iln.uio.no. | ORCID | my university page
The two Kalamang grammars are not very different, but please use the 2022 version for the most up-to-date analyses.
2022. Eline Visser. A grammar of Kalamang. Berlin: Language Science Press.
2020. Eline Visser. A grammar of Kalamang, the Papuan language of the Karas Islands. PhD dissertation, Lund University.
forthcoming. Eline Visser. A grammar sketch of Yamdena and an introduction to its corpus. Language Documentation & Conservation.
forthcoming. Eline Visser. The structure of Kalamang narratives. In Aone van Engelenhoven (ed.), Lokabasa Nusantara: Oral Traditions in Insular Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
forthcoming. Eline Visser. Kalamang. In Nicholas Evans and Sebastian Fedden (eds.), Oxford Guide to the Papuan languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
forthcoming. Eline Visser. Negation in Kalamang. In Matti Miestamo and Ljuba Veselinova (eds.), Negation in the languages of the world: Typologically and functionally based descriptions. Berlin: Language Science Press.
2023. Eline Visser. Yamdena (im)perfectivity: the interplay between legacy material and fieldwork. Semantic Fieldwork Methods 5(1).
2022. Lyskawa, Paulina, Jade Sandsted, Eline Visser, Nathan Young, & Björn Lundquist. Successes and shortcomings of phonological accounts of Scandinavian object shift. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 7(1), 5261.
2021. Marian Klamer, Owen Edwards, Hanna Fricke, Zoi Gialitaki, Francesca Moro, Axel Palmér, George Saad, Yunus Sulistyono, Eline Visser and Jiang Wu. Practicalities of language data collection and management in and around Indonesia. Wacana 22(2), 467-521.
2021. Eline Visser. Of mace and monkeys: Kalamang texts. Texts in the Languages of the Pacific 2.
2020. Eline Visser. Tracking and recognitional use of Kalamang opa, demonstrative of cognitive accessibility. In Åshild Næss, Anna Margetts and Yvonne Treis (eds.). Demonstratives in discourse, 103-121. Berlin: Language Science Press.
2020. Marieke Olthof, Eva van Lier, Tjeu Claessen, Swintha Danielsen, Katharina Haude, Nico Lehmann, Maarten Mous, Elisabeth Verhoeven, Eline Visser, Marine Vuillermet and Arok Wolvengrey. Verb-based restrictions on noun incorporation across languages. Linguistic Typology 24(2), 211-256.
2015. Eline Visser. Tensed evidentials: a typological study. Linguistic typology 19(2), 279-325.
2023. Eline Visser, Kamal Kanabaraf, Rustam Kanabaraf, Salis Maswatu Kanabaraf and Safrudin Tianotak. Uruangnirin language documentation. Endangered Languages Archive.
2020. Eline Visser. Uruangnirin collection. Lund University Humanities Lab.
2023. Eline Visser. The Yamdena language corpus. Lund University Humanities Lab.
2021. Eline Visser. Multi-CAST Kalamang. In Haig, Geoffrey and Stefan Schnell (eds.). Multi-CAST: Multilingual corpus of annotated spoken texts.
2020. Eline Visser. The Kalamang collection: an archive of linguistic and cultural material from Karas. Lund University Humanities Lab.
2020. Eline Visser. Geser-Gorom collection. Lund University Humanities Lab.
2019. Eline Visser. Geser-Gorom collection. The Language Archive.
2021. Eline Visser. Kalamang - IDS word list. In Key, Mary Ritchie & Bernard Comrie (eds.). The Intercontinental Dictionary Series. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
2020. Eline Visser. Kalamang dictionary. Dictionaria 13.
2020. Eline Visser. Kalamang dictionary (archived version). PARADISEC catalog.
2019. Eline Visser. Uruangnirin (comparative word list). In Gereon A. Kaiping, Owen Edwards and Marian Klamer (eds.). LexiRumah 3.0.0. Leiden: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
2019. Eline Visser. Geser-Gorom (comparative word list). In Gereon A. Kaiping, Owen Edwards and Marian Klamer (eds.). LexiRumah 3.0.0. Leiden: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
2018. Eline Visser. Kalamang (comparative word list). In Gereon A. Kaiping, Owen Edwards and Marian Klamer (eds.). LexiRumah 3.0.0. Leiden: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
2023. Eline Visser. Kamus bahasa Wangniring. [Wangniring dictionary.] A free mobile phone app with 1800 Uruangnirin lemmas and Papuan Malay translations, some example sentences, and 360 pictures. Made with SIL's Dictionary App Builder.
2021. Eline Visser. Kamus bahasa Kalamang. [Kalamang dictionary.] A free mobile phone app with 3800 Kalamang lemmas, Indonesian and English translations, example sentences, and more than 600 pictures. Made with SIL's Dictionary App Builder.
2019. Eline Visser, Fajaria Yarkuran and Kamaruddin Gusek. Kuawi. Dongeng bahasa Kalamang. [Kuawi. A Kalamang tale.] A children's book based on a Kalamang oral narrative, illustrated by Kalamang school children. Distributed in Mas, Karas, Indonesia. Self-published.
2023. Eline Visser. Linguistic fieldwork in eastern Indonesia. 3rd International Virtual Seminar on Endangered Language and Linguistics (IVSoELL). Medan, Indonesia. slides
2023. Eline Visser. Differential subject marking in Uruangnirin. Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics conference (APLL 15). Olomouc.
2023. Eline Visser. Differential subject marking in Uruangnirin. Grammatical relations in spoken language corpora. Paris. (variants presented at colloquia in Lund and Uppsala)
2022. Eline Visser. Investigating Yamdena verbal inflection without doing fieldwork – successes and shortcomings. Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics conference (APLL 14). Berlin. | slides
2022. Eline Visser. Digitalizing legacy material: lessons from Yamdena (Southeast Maluku). SEALS 31. Hawaii. | slides
2021. Paulina Lyskawa, Jade Sandstedt, Eline Visser, Nathan Young and Björn Lundquist. Successes and shortcomings of phonological accounts of Scandinavian Object Shift. Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America meeting (LSA). Washington, DC.
2021. Eline Visser. Examples: how to get them, how they are used by others. Descriptive Grammar & Typology II. Paris. slides
2019. Eline Visser. ELAN - FLEx - ELAN. Uppladoc Workshop on language documentation. Uppsala University, Uppsala. slides - supplementary materials
(All talks about Kalamang 2015-2020 have been superseded by the grammar.)