معرفی
Antoinette Schapper is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, with affiliations to the Network Institute. Her research lies at the intersection of historical, comparative, and typological linguistics, focusing on the Austronesian and Papuan languages of Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Her research interests include language classification, lexical typology, possession, animacy, and the linguistic prehistory of New Guinea and Wallacea. She is particularly known for her work on the classification of understudied languages and the implications of migration on language spread. Her recent publications reflect a strong interdisciplinary approach, combining linguistic analysis with genetic and anthropological data.
The trends in her recent articles show a consistent focus on language isolates, possession systems, and the classification of Oceanic and Papuan languages. Her work often appears in high-impact publications such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Oceanic Linguistics, demonstrating both empirical rigor and theoretical depth.
She has received notable recognition including:
- Papuan Futures Grant (2024): Supporting collaborative research on the future of Papuan language studies.
- Rodney Huddleston Prize (2022): Awarded for academic excellence in linguistics.
Dr. Schapper leads the active research project OUTOFPAPUA: Papuans on the move, which investigates the linguistic prehistory of West Papuan languages. She supervises Master’s theses in Linguistics and teaches courses such as Comparative Linguistics, Field Methods, and Cognitive and Functional Linguistics. Her lab includes PhD candidates and project researchers focused on language documentation and historical reconstruction.
