معرفی
Borja Herce is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich's Department of Comparative Linguistics, affiliated with the Distributional Linguistics Lab. His research focuses on morphology and diachrony, particularly paradigmatic relations in inflectional systems, morphomes, and inflection classes. He employs qualitative and quantitative methods across global languages to study complex morphological structures.
- University: University of Zurich
- Department: Department of Comparative Linguistics
Herce's work spans phonological, morphological, and typological analysis. Key projects include comparative studies of Romance languages (Spanish, Catalan, Romanian) and Otomanguean languages (Central Pame), examining phenomena like stem alternations, morphomic templates, and positional splits in agreement paradigms.
He has developed computational resources like VeLeSpa (Peninsular Spanish verbs) and VeLeRo (Romanian verbs), enabling detailed morphological predictability analysis. His publications highlight the interplay of naturalness gradients, semantic similarity, and token frequency in shaping morphological systems.
Notable Research Contributions
- Identified diachronic origins of Central Pame's free variation patterns via historical corpus analysis
- Quantified morphomic productivity in Romance innovations (15% adherence to templates)
- Linked vowel chain shifts in Central Pame to phonetic fronting among young female speakers
- Proposed predictive models for morphological complexity metrics as phylogenetic signals
- Challenged traditional dichotomies between morphemes and morphomes through distributional semantics
