Fábio Bonfim Duarte is a Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He works with Native American Languages, spoken in The Amazonian region, and with Bantu Languages, spoken in Mozambique. He is a field-working linguist with formal training in theoretical linguistics and language documentation & revitalization. He conducts research on the Guajajara, Tembé, Ka’apor, Gavião Pykobye, Maxacali, Tucano, Apãniekra, Apinajé, Terena among other languages. He has also been focusing on the analysis of the Changana Language, spoken in Mozambique.  He has worked to build collaborations with the communities of speakers who are working to document, promote, and revitalize these languages.

In addition to language documentation and revitalization initiatives, Duarte’s research is focused on variation across human languages, specifically in the domains of syntax (sentence structure) and morphology (word structure). The bigger questions driving his research are: what are the ways that human languages can differ from one another? what are the ways in which they cannot? and what does this tell us about the human capacity for language? To answer these questions, his research has focused primarily on understudied Indigenous languages of the Amazonia, which differ in interesting ways from more commonly-studied languages like English and French. He is especially interested in the topics of ergativity, split ergativity, case and agreement systems, extraction asymmetries, nominalization, word order, object shift, differential object marking, person hierarchy, word order in VSO and predicate fronting languages, focus and conjoint/disjoint alternation in Bantu, mass and count nouns and typology. He has been invited to be a guest researcher in several universities across the world, such as University of Massachussets (Amherst); University of Toronto; University of Leiden; University of Maputo (Eduardo Mondlane) and University of Georgia (Athens).

Research Interests:

• Linguistic Diversity
• Language
• Documentation and Revitalization
• Chomskyan syntax
• Typology
• Agreement
• Case