Hannah Gibson is Lecturer in Linguistics at Essex University, UK. Prior to joining Essex, she was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral researcher at Osaka University and a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at SOAS, University of London. Hannah’s research is concerned with linguistic variation, particularly why and how languages change. Much of her work explores the syntax and semantics of the Bantu languages, with a focus on languages spoken in Eastern Africa. She is also interested in language and identity, and language use in urban contexts.
Her theoretical work is articulated from the perspective of the Dynamic Syntax framework – a parsing/production-oriented approach to natural language processing which aims to capture the way in which meaning is established in real time. Hannah has previously worked as a Policy Researcher at the Westminster-based think tank Africa Research Institute, and has taught Swahili at SOAS and University College London, as well as the adult education college CityLit.
She is an affiliated researcher on the Leverhulme-funded research project ‘Morphosyntactic variation in Bantu: typology, contact and change’ at SOAS, University of London. She is also a project member on ‘Linguistic Variation as an Indicator of Historical Relations and Language Contact: A comparative grammar of four Mara Bantu languages (Tanzania)’ which is funded by the Kone Foundation and based at the University of Helsinki.
