About Me

I am an academic researcher whose has centered around the morphosyntax and semantics of indigenous American languages.

My dissertation, advised by Emily Bender, involved work with the Nuuchahnulth language, documenting and modeling certain coordination strategies. This was done through the HPSG formalism and with the aid of the DELPH-IN toolset which encodes computational grammars. I maintain an interest in the continuing documentation and revival of Nuuchahnulth as a spoken language.

As a member of the the Out of Asia SNSF grant at the University of Zurich, I worked on contact-driven change in languages across the Americas. This work included the documentation of the typological profiles of languages in North America and South America, and describing makes languages on these continents similar to or different from languages elsewhere in the world.

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Words, Bones, Genes, Tools DFG Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Tübingen, where I am working to model and understand typological stability in languages over time.

You can find my CV here: [PDF].

Contact

david [the dot] inman [the at] uzh [the dot] ch

Publications

Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia and Inman, David and van Dam, Kellen Parker, and Vuillermet, Marine and Easterday, Shelece and Rose, Françoise. to appear Is there a typological profile of isolates?

Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia and Inman, David and Huber, Thomas and Bickel, Balthasar. 2023. Multi-variate coding for possession: Methodology and preliminary results. Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences. [URL] [bib]

Inman, David. 2021. The exponence and development of plurals in Nuuchahnulth. International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages. [URL] [bib]

Inman, David. 2019. Multi-predicate Constructions in Nuuchahnulth. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Washington. [URL] [bib]

Inman, David. 2018. The representation of predicates at the syntactic-semantic boundary in Nuuchahnulth. International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages, Bellingham, United States. [URL] [bib]

Gina-Anne Levow, Emily M. Bender, Patrick Littell, Kristen Howell, Shobhana Chelliah, Joshua Crowgey, Dan Garrette, Jeff Good, Sharon Hargus, David Inman, Michael Maxwell, Michael Tjalve, Fei Xia. 2017. STREAMLInED Challenges: Aligning Research Interests with Shared Tasks. ComputEL-2: 39. [URL] [bib]

Inman, David and Morrison, Ruth. 2014. Negation in Nanti: Syntactic Evidence for Head and Dependent Negators. In Stefan Müller, editor, Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, University at Buffalo. 103-113. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. [URL] [bib]

Posters and Presentations

Inman, David. 2022. Multi-predicate constructions in Nuuchahnulth. ComPLETE conference in Mainz.

Inman, David and Vuillermet, Marine. 2022. Singular-plural stem alternation. Societas Linguistica Europaea.

Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia and Inman, David and van Dam, Kellen Parker, and Vuillermet, Marine and Easterday, Shelece and Rose, Françoise. 2021. Is there a typological profile of isolates? Societas Linguistica Europaea.

Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia and Inman, David and van Dam, Kellen Parker, and Vuillermet, Marine and Easterday, Shelece and Rose, Françoise. 2021. Mapping linguistic areas: a preliminary case study in South America. Biennial conference of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA).

Inman, David. 2021. Conceptual Interdependence in Language Description, Typology, and NLP. ACL Special Interest Group on Typology. [youtube part 1]

Inman, David. 2019. The development of adpositions in Nuuchahnulth. Presentation at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, New York, United States. [handout]

Inman, David. 2018. Reexamining the Nuuchahnulth article. Poster at Syntax of the World's Languages 8, Paris, France.

Inman, David and Werle, Adam. 2016. Second Position Effects in Suffixes and Clitics in Nuuchahnulth. Presentation at the 3rd International colloquium on the typology of Amerindian languages, Lima, Peru.

Inman, David and Werle, Adam. 2016. Word categories in Westcoast. Presentation at the 51st International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages, Tla'amin First Nation.

Werle, Adam and Inman, David. 2016. Westcoast (South Wakashan) terms and notations. Presentation at the 51st International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages, Tla'amin First Nation.

Inman, David. 2015. Pronoun Incorporation in Matsigenka. Poster presented at the 22nd International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Nanyang Technical University.

Research Positions

• November 2023 — May 2024: Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tübingen
• November 2019 — October 2023: Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zürich

Teaching Positions

• 2021 Autumn: Typologies of Linguistic Structures
• 2021 Spring: Structures of Language Families and Language Areas
• 2020 Autumn: Typologies of Linguistic Structures
• 2020 Spring: Elicitation Techniques
• 2019 Winter: Advanced Statistical Methods in NLP (TA)
• 2018 Autumn: Float TA
• 2018 Summer: RA for CLMS
• 2018 Spring: NLP Systems and Applications (TA)
• 2017 Autumn: RA for CLMS
• 2017 Spring: Introduction to Computational Linguistics (TA)
• 2017 Winter: Float TA
• 2016 Autumn: Shallow Processing Techniques in NLP (TA)
• 2016 Summer: Introduction to Linguistic Thought
• 2016 Spring: Introduction to Computational Linguistics
• 2016 Winter: Float TA
• 2015 Autumn: Shallow Processing Techniques in NLP (TA)
• 2015 Summer: Fundamentals of Grammar
• 2015 Spring: Introduction to Linguistic Thought (TA)
• 2015 Winter: Fundamentals of Grammar (TA)
• 2014 Autumn: Introduction to Linguistic Thought (TA)
• 2014 Spring: LING Advanced Statistical Methods in NLP (TA)
• 2014 Winter: Introduction to Linguistic Thought (TA)
• 2013 Autumn: Introduction to Linguistic Thought (TA)