hello.

I'm a postdoctoral researcher working in the Department for Linguistic and Cultural Evolution (DLCE) at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. I'm currently working on the ERC-Synergy Grant QUANTA (Evolution of Cognitive Tools for Quantification), exploring how numerals are expressed across the world's languages, and investigating how cultural evolutionary pressures might affect how we represent numbers linguistically, and how we communicate about quantity.

For instance, some questions that excite me are:

• Can we observe any typological constraints on how large numbers are represented? Are some mathematical operations (like addition) more common ways to combine numbers than others (like division)?


• How do pressures for language to be simple and learnable, yet expressive and useful for communicating, affect the kinds of constraints we observe on numeral systems?


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

my phd.

I did my PhD in the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh, where I was supervised by Professors Kenny Smith, Simon Kirby, and Fiona Jordan (who actually works at University of Bristol). My thesis, Simplicity, Informativeness, and the Emergent Structure of Kinship Terminology explores how kin are categorised terminologically across the world's languages, and how cultural evolutionary pressures might affect the organisational structure and the semantics of kin terms.

Drop me a line at maisy.hallam [at] eva.mpg.de.