Marit Lobben defended her Ph.D in linguistics at the University of Oslo in June 2010. The topic of her dissertation was syntactic polysemy of the two syntactic constructions causative and benefactive in the Afroasiatic language Hausa, spoken predominantly in Niger and Nigeria. The argument is brought forward within a cognitive grammar framework and substantiated by extensive cross-linguistic data.
Her M.Phil. thesis was on product oriented (schema type) storage and memorization techniques of Hausa plurals, argued on the basis of data from psycholinguistic experiments and child language (1991). She did fieldwork in Niger, Nigeria, and in the Ivory Coast (1990, 1994).
She also studied Hausa at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (1989-90) and passed an advanced Hausa exam at Indiana University (1994), where she was also a visiting scholar.
Her Candidata Magisterae degree was on anthropology, English, Russian and general linguistics.
Marit is in the process of applying for funding for her Post doc project Cognitive bases for grammatical categories. The project combines knowledge from two independent but interconnected fields of research: cognitive neuropsychology and linguistics.
Within neuropsychology, pathological states of patients give rise to knowledge about processes of the brain and their interaction with the language faculty.
Within linguistics, her focus is on language as a cognitive and universal phenomenon as it shows itself in typological variation, child language acquisition, language dissolution phenomena, and diachronic change.
The general aim is to investigate the relationship between grammatical structures and general cognitive abilities of the brain, with a view to finding out how general cognition affects and shapes language structures.
e-mail: marit.lobben@psykologi.uio.no