Myriam Klapi

I was born in Athens and have been raised bilingual. I have always wanted to understand how language works in terms of language acquisition and speech production. After my first Bachelors Degree in Marketing and after working several years as a marketing assistant, I realized that industry is not my place in the world. I studied German philology at the National University of Athens, where I was first introduced to Linguistics. After graduating in 2008, completely fascinated by the field, I decided to do a Master’s Degree in Linguistics at the Humbold-University. I worked as a student assistant to Prof. Dr. Katharina Spalek in the department of Psycholinguistics, which enhanced my linguistic empirical knowledge. At the same time and together with student colleagues we decided to build a spoken Corpus called Berlin Map Task Corpus under the supervision and support of Prof. Dr. Anke Lüdeling, who inspired the project. In my masters thesis I wrote about Disfluency Patterns of native and nonnative German speakers, a research which was based on the BeMaTaC data.

My shift to sign linguistics was inspired by the Deaf community in Athens and my two supervisors. Since my involvement with sign languages and after visiting a series of relevant workshops, I realized that the field offers a whole new perspective among modalities and research. Currently and after receiving a fellowship from the Max-Planck Institute for History of Sciences, I have started working on my PhD thesis under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Markus Steinbach and Dr. Chrysostomos Papaspyrou. The thesis involves a comparison of Greek and Turkish Sign Language by embracing sociolinguistic and historical aspects. Other interests are favorite linguistic fields such as language contact, code-switching, language evolution, bilingualism and speech production.