Isabelle Bril is a senior researcher at the

French National Centre for Scientific Research The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...

and a member of

LACITO LACITO (''Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale'') is a multidisciplinary research organisation, principally devoted to the study of cultures and languages of oral tradition. LACITO is a branch of the Centre National de la Recherche Scienti ...

specializing in

morphosyntax In linguistics, morphology () is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morp ...

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and compu ...

typology Typology is the study of types or the systematic classification of the types of something according to their common characteristics. Typology is the act of finding, counting and classification facts with the help of eyes, other senses and logic. Ty ...

, and Austronesian languages.

Biography

Bril completed her

agrégation In France, the ''agrégation'' () is a competitive examination for civil service in the French public education system. Candidates for the examination, or ''agrégatifs'', become ''agrégés'' once they are admitted to the position of ''profess ...

in 1977, subsequently working as an English teacher between 1978 and 1993, then as Assistant Professor (Maître de Conférences) at Tours University between 1998 and 2001. Her doctoral degree was awarded in 1995 by

Paris Diderot University Paris Diderot University, also known as Paris 7 (french: Université Paris Diderot), was a French university located in Paris, France. It was one of the inheritors of the historic University of Paris, which was split into 13 universities in 197 ...

for a book-length treatment of utterance structure in the Austronesian language Nêlêmwa. In 2005 she received her

habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in many European countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excellence in research, teaching and further education, usually including ...

. She became a researcher at the

in 2001, and was promoted to senior researcher first class in 2017. In 2014, she was elected Directeur d'Etudes at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. In 2014, Bril was elected as a member of the

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europea ...

. She served as President of the Greenberg award of the

Association for Linguistic Typology Association may refer to: *Club (organization), an association of two or more people united by a common interest or goal *Trade association, an organization founded and funded by businesses that operate in a specific industry *Voluntary associatio ...

in 2011 and 2015; in 2022, she was Vice-President of the

Linguistic Society of Paris Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

and is now its President for the year 2023.

Research

Bril’s research focuses on the description and analysis of Austronesian languages, including Nêlêmwa, Zuanga, and

Amis Amis may refer to: * Amis (surname) * Amis people (or ''Amis''), a tribe of Taiwanese aborigines * Amis language, an indigenous language of Taiwan * AMIS (ISP), an Internet service provider (ISP) in Slovenia and Croatia * Amis et Amiles, an old ...

, from synchronic, diachronic and typological perspectives. In order to achieve this, she has carried out extensive and original linguistic fieldwork on these underdescribed and endangered languages. The linguistic phenomena she has investigated include

coordination Coordination may refer to: * Coordination (linguistics), a compound grammatical construction * Coordination complex, consisting of a central atom or ion and a surrounding array of bound molecules or ions * Coordination number or ligancy of a centr ...

and

subordination Subordination may refer to *Subordination in a hierarchy (in military, society, etc.) ** Insubordination, disobedience * Subordination (linguistics) *Subordination (finance) *Subordination agreement, a legal document used to deprecate the claim o ...

, complex predicates, reciprocals, middles,

symmetrical voice Symmetrical voice, also known as Austronesian alignment, the Philippine-type voice system or the Austronesian focus system, is a typologically unusual kind of morphosyntactic alignment in which "one argument can be marked as having a special relat ...

valency Valence or valency may refer to: Science * Valence (chemistry), a measure of an element's combining power with other atoms * Degree (graph theory), also called the valency of a vertex in graph theory * Valency (linguistics), aspect of verbs re ...

grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and other languages present number categories of ...

, and

possession Possession may refer to: Law *Dependent territory, an area of land over which another country exercises sovereignty, but which does not have the full right of participation in that country's governance *Drug possession, a crime *Ownership *Per ...

Selected publications

* Bril, Isabelle. 2000. ''Dictionnaire nêlêmwa-nixumwak-français-anglais: avec introduction grammaticale et lexiques'' (Nêlêmwa-Nixumak-French-English dictionary: with a grammatical introduction and lexica). Leuven: Peeters. * Bril, Isabelle. 2002. ''Le nêlêmwa (Nouvelle-Calédonie): Analyse syntaxique et sémantique''. (The Nêlêmwa language of New Caledonia: a syntactic and semantic analysis.) Leuven: Peeters. * Bril, Isabelle. 2004. ''Complex nuclei in Oceanic languages: Contribution to an areal typology.'' In Bril and Ozanne-Rivierre (eds.), 1–48. * Bril, Isabelle. 2004. Coordination strategies and inclusory constructions in New Caledonian and other Oceanic languages. In

Martin Haspelmath Martin Haspelmath (; born 2 February 1963 in Hoya, Lower Saxony) is a German linguist working in the field of linguistic typology. He is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he worked from 1998 ...

(ed.), ''Coordinating constructions'', 499–533. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. * Bril, Isabelle, and Françoise Ozanne-Rivierre (eds.). 2004. ''Complex predicates in Oceanic languages''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. * Bril, Isabelle. 2005. Semantic and functional diversification of reciprocal and middle prefixes in New Caledonian and other Austronesian languages. ''Linguistic Typology'' 9-1: 25-75. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. * Bril, Isabelle (ed.). 2010. ''Clause linking and clause hierarchy: Syntax and pragmatics''. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. * Bril, Isabelle. 2012. Ownership, part-whole and other possessive-associative relations in Nêlêmwa (New Caledonia). In

Alexandra Aikhenvald Alexandra Yurievna "Sasha" Aikhenvald (''Eichenwald'') is a Russian Australian linguist specialising in linguistic typology and the Arawak language family (including Tariana) of the Brazilian Amazon basin. She is a professor at the James Co ...

and

R. M. W. Dixon Robert Malcolm Ward "Bob" Dixon (born 25 January 1939, in Gloucester, England) is a Professor of Linguistics in the College of Arts, Society, and Education and The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Queensland. He is also Deputy Director o ...

(eds.), ''Possession and ownership: a cross-linguistic typology'', 65–89. * Bril, Isabelle. 2016. Information Structure in Northern Amis (Formosan): a morphosyntactic analysis. ''Oceanic linguistics'', 55: 2, 451-481. * Bril, Isabelle. 2017, Roots and stems: Lexical and functional flexibility in Amis and Nêlêmwa. ''Studies in Language''. E. van Lier (ed.), Special issue on lexical flexibility in Oceanic languages, 41:2, 358-407. * Bril, Isabelle. 2020. Indefinite expressions and accessibility hierarchy to core argument functions in a sample of Austronesian languages (and beyond). ''Studies in Language'', 44:2, 407–460. * Bril, Isabelle. 2022, Lexical restrictions on grammatical relations in voice constructions (Northern Amis). In Eva van Lier and Maria Messerschmidt (Eds.). Lexical restrictions on grammatical relations in voice and valency constructions. ''STUF Language Typology and Universals'', 75(1), 21-71.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Bril, Isabelle Living people Paris Diderot University alumni French National Centre for Scientific Research scientists Members of Academia Europaea French women linguists Linguists from France Semanticists Syntacticians Linguists of Austronesian languages Year of birth missing (living people)