James Engels
Bio
I am a 3rd year Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Wataru Uegaki, Dan Lassiter, and Ben Molineaux. I study meaning, time, and the ways things {are, could be, should be, used to be…}, specifically how languages encode these concepts in their grammar, and the boundaries of that variation across languages. In my case, that means doing fine-grained lexical semantics of individual morphemes in understudied languages.
In the past I have worked on small language models for Modern Tibetan. From time to time I can still be found working on historical linguistics in Sino-Tibetan languages.
In my last name the second “E” comes before the “L”, the same as my distant relative. Any fellow travelers named Marx working in linguistics or allied fields (mathematics, philosophy, etc.) are strongly encouraged to contact me for an urgent collaboration.
Research Interests
- Formal Semantics: tense-aspect-modality, conditionals, definiteness, lexical semantics
- Typology: word/morpheme order and scope, syntactic variation
- Areas: Patagonia, East Africa (esp. Nilotic), Mainland Southeast Asia
Research Languages
- Active: Mapudungun, Sengwer-Cherang’any, Vietnamese
- Past: Tashelhiyt, Sylheti
Updates
- [Jan. 2027] I will be joining the linguistics department at Harvard University as a fellow from January to May of 2027.
- [Sep. 2026] I gave a talk at the Linguistics Association of Great Britain about the meaning of the Tashelhiyt morpheme AD.
- [Sep. 2026] I gave a talk about Mapudungun frustratives at Sinn und Bedeutung 31 in Nantes.
- [Jul. 2026] I presented with Federico Falletti on tense stacking and conditionals in Sengwer at the 16th ALT in Lyon.
Publications
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Cross-Linguistic Dataset of Force-Flavor Combinations in Modal ElementsLinguistic Variation 25(2), pp. 269–302, 2025.
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Developing a Semantic Search Engine for Modern TibetanRevue d'Études Tibétaines 74, pp. 261–283, 2025.
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LLMs in Low-Resourced Language NLP: Developing a spaCy Modern Tibetan Language Model from ScratchRevue d'Études Tibétaines 74, pp. 187–220, 2025.
Selected; see my
In Prep
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Choice-functional frustrativity and the semantics of Mapudungun FUIn prep
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Tense, aspect, and transparent X-marking in SengwerIn prep
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Xiesheng Imputation: A New Computational Method for Studying Old Chinese PhonologyCahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 2027In revision
Presentations
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Sinn und Bedeutung 31, Nantes Université, September 2026.Slides Full paper to appear in accompanying proceedings
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Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, University of Edinburgh, September 2026.
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Proximatives, Tense, and Event Sequencing in Kalenjin55th Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics, Leiden University, August 2026.
Selected; see my
Service
Conference Organization
Journal Reviewing
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