Hope Morgan

Hope Morgan is a alumnus from the first cohort of anthropogeny graduate specialization students. Her research primarily focuses on the systemic properties of sign language lexicons, guided by the following questions. How do signs emerge and take on categorical formational properties in relation to other signs in a lexicon (i.e., phonology and morphology)? How are those forms constrained by communicative and learnability pressures, such as confusability, frequency, articulatory ease, and phonological complexity? And how do meanings become encoded in form within a lexical network, at both the level of word meaning, as well as in the motivated sub-parts of words, including iconic motivations and metaphoric reference? 

Hope completed her PhD at UCSD in 2017, writing a phonological grammar of Kenyan Sign Language. She was a post-doc at the University of Haifa in Israel from 2017-2019 ('Grammar of the Body' project; PI: Wendy Sandler), then had a LEaDing Fellowship at Leiden University (2019-2021), followed by a post-doc research position at Radboud University Nijmegen (2021-2023). Currently, she leads the ERC-funded 'SemaSign' project at Universität Hamburg (2024-2029) to investigate constructions of lexical semantic associations and morphology in three sign languages—one in Europe and two in Africa.