Dr Theresa Biberauer

Dr Theresa Biberauer is Director of Studies in Linguistics at Magdalene. She is an Affilited Lecturer in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics.

Theresa Biberauer is Professor Extraordinary at her South African alma mater, Stellenbosch University, a research affiliate at the Center for Research in Syntax, Semantics and Phonology (CRISSP) at KU Leuven (Belgium), and a Mercator Fellow in the context of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-funded Negation in Language and Beyond project co-hosted by the Universities of Frankfurt, Göttingen and Tübingen. She did an M.Phil. in English and Applied Linguistics and a PhD in Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Cambridge (St John’s College), before embarking on a Junior Research Fellowship (Newnham) and a series of AHRC- and ERC-funded research projects. Her doctoral research focused on some of the structural peculiarities of Afrikaans, a language which is often (incorrectly) described as “the youngest language in the world” and which is also typically (again, incorrectly) thought to be a simplified clone of its European parent, Dutch.

Her current research is concerned with the very large question of what the building blocks of human language are and the extent to which it is possible to identify universals in this domain. She pursues this question via research in comparative syntax and morphology, in language acquisition, and in diachronic change, with language contact and un(der)studied linguistic varieties being a major focus across these domains.