Olivier Winistörfer
Assistent für Französische Sprachwissenschaft (Prof. Dr. E. Stark)
Romanisches Seminar
Zürichbergstrasse 8
CH - 8032 Zürich
Büro ZUG F 31
Consultations: upon request
Research Topics
Language contact
Language Typology
Romance linguistics
Languages of the Balkans
Balkan sprachbund
Corpus linguistics
Short summary
In my research, I combine methods of quantitative and qualitative research as well as linguistic typology and dialectology. Among my main research interests are the mechanisms and phenomena of language contact (predominantly in non-standardized and under-studied minority varieties), inter- and intra-diatopic variation, language typology, corpus linguistics, typological datasets, phylogenetics, and historical linguistics.
In the context of my PhD project (funded by the SNSF, doc.ch, grant number: 203935), I have not only built a typological dataset of 23 Albanian, Greek, Romance, Slavic, and Turkish varieties, but also conducted linguistic fieldwork in the Republic of North Macedonia and the Republic of Kosovo with speakers of Albanian, Aromanian, Macedonian, West Rumelian and Yörük Turkish.
Further, I am investigating the geographical distribution and mechanisms of various phenomena in Balkan Romance (Aromanian, Istro-Romanian, Meglen Vlah) and other Balkan varieties (Albanian, Greek, Macedonian, Balkan Turkish). For this research, I have also conceptualized and built linguistic tools and corpora.
Academic experience
| 02/2025 - now | Assistant in French and Romance Linguistics (Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Stark) at the University of Zurich |
| 10/2023-04/2024 | Research stay at the University of Helsinki (Finland) funded by the Mobility Grant of the SNSF |
| 09/2021-07/2025 | PhD in Linguistics (Project title: The Balkan sprachbund reconsidered. A multi-variate, historicist approach to the ‘prototypical’ case of a sprachbund) funded by the SNSF at the University of Zurich (Grant number: 203935) |
| 02/2021-08/2021 | Research assistant in the SNSF Project Distribution and function of ‘partitive articles’ in Romance (DiFuPaRo): a microvariation analysis |
| 8/201-01/2019 |
Tutor for “Prolegomena Linguistik” at the Department of Romance Languages, University of Zurich |
| 8/2018-01/2019 | Tutor for “Morphosyntax der Balkansprachen” at the Department of Slavic Languages, University of Zurich |
| 8/2018-08/2021 | Research assistant in the SNSF Project ‘Ill-bred sons’, family and friends: tracing the multiple affiliations of Balkan Slavic |
| 3/2017-8/2018 |
Research assistant for Italian varieties at the Department of Romance Languages, University of Zurich |
| 11/2017-5/2018 | Research assistant for Tupi-Guarani languages at the Department of Comparative Language Science, University of Zurich |
Education
| 02/2021-07/2025 | PhD in Linguistics (Project title: The Balkan sprachbund reconsidered. A multi-variate approach to the ‘prototypical’ case of a sprachbund) funded by the SNSF at the University of Zurich |
| 09/2017-01/2021 | Master of Arts in Romance Linguistics and Evolutionary Linguistics at the University of Zurich |
| 09/2011-08/2017 | Bachelor of Arts in Romance Linguistics and Comparative Linguistics at the University of Zurich |
Selected presentations
| 08/2024 | Held talk Untangling the Balkans. Insights from a typological dataset of the Balkans at 57th Annual Meeting of the SLE in Helsinki |
| 11/2023 | Held talk Back to the Balkans. A multi-variate approach to the prototypical case of a 'sprachbund' at University of Helsinki |
| 11/2023 | Held talk The West Rumelian and Yöruk Turkish varieties from a Balkan perspective at Fundamentals and Advances in Balkan Linguistics (FABL) in Belgrade |
| 11/2023 | Held talk Das Balkanromanische – eine oft vernachlässigte typologische Schatztruhe der Romanistik at Das Balkanromanische: Diachronie und Perspektiven at the University of Zurich |
| 12/2022 | Held talk Why minority languages matter. How Aromanian and West Rumelian Turkish help understand factors of societal multilingualism in the Balkan Sprachbund at Minority and Endangered Languages in the Multilingual Context of the Balkans (MELMUB) in Venice |
| 11/2022 | Held talk Getting the bigger picture: a proposal for a cross-linguistic Balkan corpus and tagging system at International scientific conference to 100 years since the birth of Prof. Dr. Olivera Jašar-Nasteva in Skopje |
| 11/2022 | Held talk The often forgotten-ones. How the Aromanian and West Rumelian Turkish dialectal variation might help us with unsolved questions on the Balkan sprachbund at International scientific conference to 100 years since the birth of Prof. Dr. Olivera Jašar-Nasteva in Skopje |
| 8/2022 | Held talk The Albanian varieties in the context of the Balkan sprachbund at XL International seminar on Albanian language, literature, and culture in Prishtina |
| 12/2021 | Held talk The Balkan sprachbund reconsidered. A multi-variate, historicist approach to the ‘prototypical’ case of a sprachbund at ABLA (Atlas of Balkan Languages) workshop at the CNRS in Paris |
Linguistic fieldwork
| 8/2023 | Fieldwork on the West Rumelian and Yörük Turkish varieties in the Republic of North Macedonia and the Republic of Kosovo |
| 8/2022 | Fieldwork on the West Rumelian and Yörük Turkish varieties in the Republic of North Macedonia and the Republic of Kosovo with Dr. Maxim Makartsev |
| 8/2021 | Fieldwork on the Aromanian varieties in the Republic of North Macedonia with Dr. Maxim Makartsev |
| 8/2019 | Organised fieldwork trip on Albanian, Aromanian, and Macedonian varieties in the Republic of North Macedonia with the Department of Slavic Languages, University of Zurich |
| 3/2019 | Participation in fieldwork on the Castilian varieties in La Palma, Spain, with the Department of Romance Languages, University of Zurich |
| 2/2019 | Fieldwork on the Aromanian varieties in the Republic of North Macedonia with the Department of Slavic Languages, University of Zurich |
| 6/2018 | Participation in fieldwork on the Istroromanian variety in Žejan, Croatia, with the Department of Romance Languages, University of Zurich |
| 6/2018 | Participation in fieldwork on the Italian varieties in Ripatransone, Italy, with the Department of Romance Languages, University of Zurich |
Public outreach
| 06/2024 | Organised cultural exchange expedition with the school of Herzogenbuchsee (CH) to show the importance of linguistic, ethnic, religious tolerance in the Balkans (Serbia, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia) |
Publikationen
ZORA Publikationsliste
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Publikationen
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Lost in the Balkans: Differential Place Marking in the Aromanian Varieties. Journal of Contemporary Philology, 8(1):129-143.
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At the crossroads of definiteness, specificity, and animacy - the local patterns of differential object marking in the Aromanian varieties. In: Sedakova, Irina A; Makartsev, Maxim M; Civ'jan, Tat'jana V. Definiteness and indefiniteness in the languages and cultures of the Balkans. Moscow: Балканские Чтения, Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 75-82.
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Corpora and Processing Tools for Non-Standard Contemporary and Diachronic Balkan Slavic. In: The 12th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019), Varna, Bulgaria, 2 September 2019 - 4 September 2019. INCOMA, 62-68.