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Jocelyn Aznar, Dr.
Postdoctoral Researcher
I am a postdoctoral researcher within the LingUnits project in the Department of Comparative Language Science at the University of Zurich. My research lies at the intersection of documentation linguistics, corpus linguistics, ethnolinguistics and typology. I enjoy creating versatile resources, useful for the linguists and the people they work with. In my research, I often aim to intertwine into a productive dialogue the ethnographic and qualitative observations with some corpus-based and quantitative perspectives.
Since 2011, I have been working with the Nisvai community (nisv1234) in South-East Malekula, Vanuatu , on an ethnolinguistic documentation of their language practices. During my PhD (2019), I developed a corpus of oral narratives and demonstrated how variations in narrative texts produced by Nisvai speakers correlate with the speaker's age and the narrative context.
A significant focus of my work has been documenting narratives, producing versatile resources (Aznar & Gala, 2020) that benefit both the speakers and the linguistic community. I am currently developing a comprehensive language resource that integrates lexicographic and ethnographic approaches.
Previously, I worked at the ZAS, where, in collaboration with Seifart (2020, 2022), we established quality criteria and processes for language documentation corpora. Additionally, in collaboration with Lange (2022), we developed a semi-automated corpus quality checking tool. I also contributed to the development of a 20-hour corpus of Bislama, in collaboration with Aru, Krifka, Meyerhoff, and Veenstra.
25.07.2024. C-LARA: Innovative approaches to speech and language technologies for Oceania, the world’s most linguistically diverse region, Flinders University, Bedford Park campus, Adelaide, Australia. “Let’s not be framed by dictionaries! Sharing lexical elicitations to improve lexicographic documentation, examples from the Nisvai-Bislama lexical documentation, Vanuatu”
05.07.2024. Universität Freiburg. Vortragsreihe "Language, Communication & Cognition" der Freiburger Sprachwissenschaften. “Silent pause as a discursive sign across languages: Reporting on a cross-linguistic study of direct speech, silent pause and word order using corpora from DoReCo”
Jocelyn Aznar. 2023. L'emploi des noms propres dans les narrations nisvaies en fonction de la classe d'âge de l'orateur (Malekula, Vanuatu). In: La narration : du discours à la multimodalité. Ed: Luca Greco. http://www.lambert-lucas.com/livre/la-narration-du-discours-a-la-multimodalite/
Jocelyn Aznar, Christian Döhler, Jozina Vander Klok. 2023. Applicatives in Austronesian Languages. NUSA: Linguistic studies of languages in and around Indonesia. 74, 2023, 2187-7297. DOI:10.15026/0002000084.
Aznar, Jocelyn. 2022. Nisvai DoReCo dataset. In Seifart, Frank, Ludger Paschen and Matthew Stave (eds.). Language Documentation Reference Corpus (DoReCo) 1.2. Berlin & Lyon: Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft & laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage (UMR5596, CNRS & Université Lyon 2). DOI:10.34847/nkl.2801565f
Aznar, Jocelyn, and Frank Seifart. The RefCo toolkit. 2022. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.6470807
Aznar, J., & Gala, N. (2020, May). The Nisvai Corpus of Oral Narrative Practices from Malekula (Vanuatu) and its Associated Language Resources. In Language Resources and Evaluation for Language Technologies (LREC). https://hal.science/hal-02504413/document
