Ilja A. Seržant

Ilja A. Seržant works as a professor at the Potsdam University. He also had a postdoc position at the University of Leipzig in the typological project “Grammatical Universals” funded by an ERC Advanced Grant (Usage-based explanation of grammatical universals, PI Martin Haspelmath). His perspective is comparative, both typologically and diachronically. He is mainly focused on Baltic (Lithuanian), East Slavic (North Russian, Russian), Finnic as well as Ancient Greek. He works on the development of the partitive case in Finnic and the partitive genitive case in Baltic and East Slavic, in particular, on the interaction between the partitive (genitive) case with other domains of grammar pertaining, e.g., to aspectuality or indefiniteness. He published a series of papers on the history of the partitive genitive from ancient Indo-European to modern Baltic and East Slavic, some descriptive papers as well as his research on language contact between the partitive (genitive) case in Baltic, East Slavic and Finnic in collective volumes and top journals (e.g. Journal of Language Contact). Ilja Seržant is a very experienced researcher, with an impressive knowledge of partitivity in, a.o., Baltic-Slavic languages, both from a synchronic, a diachronic and a contactlinguistic point of view, filling a gap in the netwerk.