RESEARCH

Publications

Funded projects

2012

Hans Rausing Endangered Language Documentation Project Small Grant: A preliminary documentation of Siluyana: Comparing Mbowe and Mwenyi.

This project makes an initial documentation of two Bantu languages in Western Zambia that lie at the boundary of Eastern and Western Bantu. It is conducted in collaboration with Mildred Nkolola and NW Mundia of the University of Zambia.

 

2011-2013

British Academy Small Grant: Tonal change in the evolution of a tense system.

This project investigates the use of tonally marked past tense in two dialects of Bemba from Northern Zambia and from the Copperbelt. It contributes to our understanding of dialect variation and historical change in Bantu.

 

 2010   

University of Essex Linguistics Departmental Research Incentive Scheme: The role of complexity in L2 segmental acquisition.

This project investigated the L3 acquisition of English mid vowels by L1 speakers of Tashylhit Berber with L2 Moroccan Arabic and French. This work was done in collaboration with Nabila Louriz. Results were reported at OCP8 and a paper on the findings is in preparation.

 

2004-2007

Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, Veni-programme - Innovational Research Incentives Scheme

The phrasal phonology of Bantu languages.

This project investigated what role prosody and phonology have to play in the organization of syntax and argued for a phonology first approach to the interface with particular reference to Bemba. Results were presented at various conferences and published in Journals and edited books (see Cheng & Kula 2006, Kula 2007, Kula & Cheng 2007, Costa and Kula 2008, Kula & Marten 2011)

2003

Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, Talent Research Fellowship: Suffix ordering in Bantu.

This project investigated phonological constraints on suffix-ordering in Bantu arguing for a domain based approach differentiating inflectional and derivational domains in phonology as argued in Kula (2002). Results are reported in Kula (2003).

 

International collaboration

2011

African Anaphora Project contribution on Bemba

 

2008-2011

European Network Project funded by the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research: Structure of nouns and noun phrases in Bantu, Chinese and Romance. Project partners from: University of Leiden, SOAS, University of Essex, ZAS, University of Trieste and University of Verona.

 

2008-2011

British Academy UK-Africa Network project: Language and linguistic studies of Southern African languages. Project partners from: SOAS, University of Durban, University of Essex, University of Namibia and University of Botswana.

 

2003-2006

British Academy international network project: Bantu grammar, theory and description. Project partners from: SOAS, University of Leiden and ZAS (Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin)

 

Internal Examining

Yu Ikemoto (2011) Psycholinguistic studies of derivational morphology in Japanese. (External examiner: Yuki Kamide)

Morris Al Omar (2011) Assimilation processes in Syrian Arabic. (External examiner: Sam Hellmuth)

Mohammed Faez (2010) Phonological processes of Persian. (External examiner: Judith Broadbent)

Ghisseh Sarako (2009) The Acquisition of the English Article system by L1 Syrian Arab and French Learners of English. (External examiner: Richard Towell)

João Veríssimo (2009) Stems and Rules: A dual-mechanism account of verbal stem formation in Portuguese. (External examiner: William Marslen-Wilson)

Belal A. Rakhieh (2008) The Phonology of Ma’ani Arabic: Stratal or Parallel OT. (External examiner: Janet Watson)

 

PhD Supervision

I am happy to supervise MA and PhD students in any area of phonology including  phonology-morphology interface, second language phonology, prosodic-phonology and the phonology-syntax interface.

 

Current PhD students

Nasir Syed: L2 phonological acquisition of consonants by L1 Saraiki learners of English

 

Naledi Kgolo: Morphological processing in Tswana (with Sonja Eisenbeiss)

 

Woroud Melhem: Phonological and morpho-syntactic constraints on the L2 acquisition of tense by L1 Syrian Arabic learners of English (with Roger Hawkins)

 

Afaf Fakhri: L2 phonological acquisition of consonant clusters by L1 Libyan Arabic  (Tripolitanian & Sabha) learners of English

 

Other Activities

 

Essex Phonology Research Group

Essex Linguistics Seminars

SLA Research Group