Professor Miriam Butt
Professor Miriam Butt

Member of the Academia Europaea

The Academia Europaea honours University of Konstanz linguist Professor Miriam Butt by voting to accept her as a member of the society

Professor Miriam Butt, a linguist at the University of Konstanz, was voted into the 2019 membership cohort of the Academia Europaea, a European scientific society that promotes science and research. Miriam Butt is Professor of General Linguistics and Computational Linguistics at the University of Konstanz and director of the Computational Linguistics Lab. She is also speaker of the DFG research unit RU 2111 “Questions at the Interfaces (QI)” and is one of the principal investigators of  the newly established Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”.

In her research, Miriam Butt focuses on South Asian languages. She specializes in Urdu (the official language in Pakistan and parts of India), investigating syntax, morphology and semantics. She is particularly interested in the interfaces between these areas, for example, the interplay of syntax and semantics. In the field of computational linguistics, Miriam Butt is involved in the international initiative ParGram, which aims to develop parallel grammars for numerous European and non-European languages. She is also interested in the visualization of language patterns.

The Academia Europaea is a scientific society with around 3, 800 members from all over Europe. The aim of this non-governmental organisation is to promote public recognition and acceptance of science and research in Europe, to advance interdisciplinary and international exchange between scientific communities, to provide advice to European institutions and organisations, and to both identify and then place important issues in Europe on the scientific agenda.

Founded in 1988, the society accepts new members from the 47 Council of Europe member states on an annual basis. Candidates are first nominated by existing members and then undergo a rigorous peer review process before they can be voted into the society. Admission into the Academia Europaea allows its members, among other things, to use the name suffix M.A.E (Member of Academia Europaea). Among its members are 72 Nobel Laureates.