By Nicole North

We are excited to announce a new member of faculty at the Department of Linguistics: Jozina Vander Klok. She has been hired in a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor. Jozina joins us from Humboldt University of Berlin, where she pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of German Studies and Linguistics. 

Vander Klok delivered a research talk at SFU Burnaby campus during Spring 2024 titled On the topic of the subject in Austronesian. “I primarily draw on empirical insights from Javanese, a Malayo-Polynesian language of the Austronesian family spoken by about 70 million people in Indonesia,” Jozina explains. “I have been conducting fieldwork in Indonesia since 2010, focusing on the varieties spoken in Yogyakarta and Semarang, Central Java, and Paciran, East Java.”  

Jozina’s passion and dedication as a field linguist is helping advance knowledge of Javanese, which is a surprisingly understudied language. “Javanese is an Austronesian language of the Western Malayo-Polynesian branch spoken in Indonesia. Despite the fact that it is the tenth largest language according to the number of native speakers, Javanese is vastly understudied, most notably in other dialects or varieties beyond Standard Javanese.” 

Vander Klok completed her PhD at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Her dissertation, Tense, aspect, and modal markers in Paciran Javanese, examines a number of syntactic and semantic aspects of the full set of TAM (tense-aspect-modal) markers in the dialect of Paciran Javanese. 

Jozina recently published a corpus data set, Lang*Reg: A multi-lingual corpus of intra-speaker variation across situations. It records intra-speaker variation across languages and different situational-functional contexts, as part of a current project with the CRC1412 that investigates aspects of the register knowledge of speakers. The data sets for each language, including German, Persian, and Kurdish, comprise the speech of the same language users in one written interaction and several spoken conversations, including between friends and strangers, with a professor, and with a taxi driver. Jozina’s recent co-authored paper in Language Documentation & Conservation details the methodology for this corpus and shows how it can be used as a template to complement language resources by creating comparable intra-individual, multi-purpose data sets. 

Jozina shares that her current work continues to explore in a similar vein. “My research investigates the cross-linguistic articulation of syntax and semantics, especially on the extended verb phrase, which include phenomena like TAM markers and applicative constructions.” 

The Department of Linguistics is thrilled to have Dr. Vander Klok join us and we look forward to learning more about her ongoing research.