User:Wulusduru

Stefan Schnell is a post-doctoral researcher in Linguistics at the School of Languages and Linguistics of The University of Melbourne (Australia). My area of expertise comprises Slavic and Oceanic languages, in particular languages from northern Vanuatu. I am since 2006 involved in collaborative efforts to document and describe the language Vera'a, spoken by approximately 500 speakers on the west coast of Vanua Lava, Torba Province, northern Vanuatu. More recently I have been involved in cross-language research that compares the way in which languages are used in actual communication by respective speakers. This research involves the creation of text corpora from diverse languages, their enrichment through specialised corpus annotation, and their quantitative analysis. In the focus of my research is the way in which speakers of different languages make use of different forms of reference in natural discourse, like the woman versus she versus zero form, as in She paid and      left. Together with Geoffrey Haig from the Otto-Friedrich Universität zu Bamberg, I have been establishing one of the first extensive text databases, called Multi-CAST, with enriched corpus mark-up that enables cross-language research in this area of discourse production and processing.