hello.

I'm a PhD student working in the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Professors Kenny Smith, Simon Kirby, and Fiona Jordan (University of Bristol).

In my research, I am looking at how kin are categorised terminologically across different languages, and how cultural evolutionary pressures might affect the organisational structure of these category systems. Questions that excite me are:

• Can we observe any typological regularities in the structure of category systems like kinship terminology?


• Why are category systems constrained? How do pressures imposed during category acquisition and communication give rise to typological universals?


• What is the interplay between language evolutionary biases and cultural change in the evolution of kinship terminology?

Drop me a line at maisy.hallam@ed.ac.uk.