Jean-Christophe Verstraete - Biography#

Jean-Christophe Verstraete is a linguist specializing in linguistic typology and the documentation of Australian Aboriginal languages. In the field of typology, he has worked on clause combining, mood & modality, case systems, NP structure and information structure. In the field of documentation, he has done fieldwork and archival work on languages of Cape York Peninsula, in Australia’s northeast, since 2003. He has produced a grammar, two community-based dictionaries, and a series of studies on case systems, pronominal systems, information structure and narrative structure. At the moment, he is working on phonological analyses of the Lamalamic languages, based on his own fieldwork and archival data, and on the genetic status of Lamalamic.

Jean-Christophe Verstraete is currently a professor of linguistics at the University of Leuven. He received doctoral and postdoctoral training at the University of Leuven, the University of Aarhus and the University of Melbourne, and has held visiting positions at the University of Melbourne, the University of Western Australia, the University of Queensland, the University of Hamburg and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has served as secretary-treasurer and member of the executive committee of the Association for Linguistic Typology (2007-2015), and as a member and vice-chair of the linguistics & cognitive science committee of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (France). He has also worked in science outreach, particularly as editor-in-chief of 'Karakter' (2009-2015), the only generalist science journal in Dutch that is run, edited and written by scientists.