Isabelle Bril - Biography#

Isabelle Bril is currently Senior Researcher (Directrice de Recherche) at the CNRS laboratory, LACITO (Laboratoire des Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale) in Paris-Villejuif. In January 2014, she was appointed as the Director of the CNRS « Fédération Typologie et Universaux des Langues », for which she earlier served as its Deputy Director from 2012. Her research focuses on Austronesian languages.

In 1995, she was awarded her doctoral degree at University Paris 7–Diderot for a monograph on Nêlêmwa, an Austronesian language of New Caledonia. A dictionary (2000) and grammar (2002) of Nêlêmwa have also been subsequently published. She continues to carry out typological research, as well as fieldwork on different branches of Austronesian.

In 2005, Dr Bril passed her « Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches » and started investigating a neighbouring, but different Kanak language, called Zuanga (another of the 28 languages of New Caledonia). From 2009 onwards, she also began research on the complex morphosyntactic organisation of Amis, one of the Austronesian languages of Taiwan.

In addition to publishing a monograph entitled Le nêlêmwa (Nouvelle-Calédonie) : Analyse syntaxique et sémantique (Paris, Peeters, 2002), Isabelle Bril has edited two important volumes, one on Complex predicates in Oceanic languages: Studies in the dynamics of binding and boundness (with F. Ozanne-Rivierre, Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), and one on coordination and subordination in a cross-linguistic perspective (Clause-linking and clause hierarchy: syntax and pragmatics, John Benjamins, 2010).

Her other scientific activities involve invitations to present courses, such as at the University of Leipzig (Summer School of Linguistic Typology, DFG-CNRS-ESF, 2010), and a postgraduate Masterclass at Manchester University (2014). She has been invited or keynote speaker to 10 conferences over the last 8 years.

Isabelle Bril is a member of the editorial board for the volume series, Studies in Diversity Linguistics (2013–) (Chief editor, M. Haspelmath), and has also served as member of the international jury for the Joseph Greenberg Award of the « Association for Linguistic Typology » (2009-2013), being its President in 2011. She is now a member of the executive committee of the « Association for Linguistic Typology » (2014-2018).