Senior Editor of the Hittite Dictionary; Associate Professor of Hittitology at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the College
Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, Room 316
1155 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Petra’s research interests cover several different but often interrelated fields of linguistics, applied to the Anatolian languages: syntactic alignment, discourse cohesion, deixis, information structure and language change in contact situations. To study these areas of interest she combines philology with language typology and functional grammar.
Petra is currently working on her second book, The Anatolian Core Cases. Whereas the other cases (ablative, allative, dative-locative, genitive, instrumental and vocative) all have been the topic of monographs, the core cases nominative, accusative andergative have only been treated in articles or as part of larger overviews and grammars. With her project she intends to fill this gap in the linguistic description of not only Hittite but of all Indo-European Anatolian languages, within the framework of language typology and functional grammar. Among the topics that the individual chapters will cover are the rise of ergativity in Hittite, noun classes, the use and non-use of enclitic pronouns, passive versus active sentences, raising phenomena, and more.
Many of Petra’s articles are available on her Academia page.
Education
2003 Ph.D., Hittitology, University of Amsterdam. Degree awarded cum laude (with honors).
1994 M.A., Semitic Languages & Cultures, University of Amsterdam. Degree awarded cum laude.
1993 M.A., Anatolian Languages & Cultures, University of Amsterdam. Degree awarded cum laude.
1989 Propedeuse Semitic Languages & Cultures, University of Amsterdam. Degree awarded cum laude
1987 Propedeuse Physics and Astronomy, University of Amsterdam. Degree awarded cum laude.
