Claudia Wegener

Dr. Claudia Wegener is a Researcher at the Department of Linguistics, University of Cologne, specializing in General Linguistics. Her work focuses on language documentation, speech-gesture interaction, and Papuan/Austronesian languages like Savosavo and Gela. She holds a PhD from Radboud University Nijmegen (2008) and has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and Malaysia.

• Previous Positions:
• Research Assistant, University of Cologne (2017–present)
• Postdoctoral Researcher at MPI for Psycholinguistics, Radboud University (2002–2011)
• DoBeS Project Leader for Savosavo documentation

Research Interests

Her research spans:

• Socio-linguistic aspects of gesture systems
• Morphosyntactic typology of Papuan languages
• Lexical semantics and kinship terminology
• Documentation methodologies for endangered languages

Publications

Her work includes a landmark grammar of Savosavo (2012), co-edited volumes on language documentation (2011), and influential articles on gesture studies (2022) and motion event encoding (2022).

Projects

• Leading the Savosavo-Gela Documentation Project (DoBeS-funded)
• Contributions to MPI's Endangered Languages Documentation Archive
• Collaborations with Australian National University and University of Manchester

Her research bridges linguistic theory with applied documentation, emphasizing community-driven preservation strategies.