CAREER PROFILE

I am a linguist with 10 years of experience in all core linguistic areas, with a focus on semantics and linguistic typology. I have experience in both quantitative and qualitative methods, fieldwork, working with language corpora, and experimental tasks. My experience in research also includes project management, extensive team work, and international collaboration. I have published 12 articles and 2 books, and presented my research at 38 international conferences around the world.

I am also a writer for a general audience with over 3 years of experience on Medium.com, where I have 5.2K followers . I have published over 90 articles for a general audience, totaling 70.5K views.

EXPERIENCE

2021-present: Freelance Writer on anakrajinovic.medium.com

• I write engaging online articles for a general audience on Medium and Substack, on diverse topics, e.g., linguistics, psychology, comics. • My most successful article gathered 31K views. • I was an editor of an online blog “Language Explained” for science communication: medium.com/language-explained. • I publish a newsletter on Substack with 314 recipients (anakrajinovic.substack.com). • I prepared my comic “Brave Hearts” for print in full color using Procreate, and self-published it for a comic convention.

Tilburg University

2023-present: PostDoc

  • Research on the typology of the visual languages used in comics in Visual Language Lab
  • I analyze comics with quantitative methods and use knowledge from linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science, in collaboration with my interdisciplinary team. • I write, revise, publish, and review research articles in scientific journals. • I design and lead several research projects, and plan their timely execution.

Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf

2020-2023: PostDoc

  • Research in the area of linguistic typology, semantics, Oceanic languages, diachrony and evolution of meaning; main project: Evolution of internet memes
  • Teaching linguistic courses
    • Winter semester 2022/23:
      • Iconicity, arbitrariness, and grammar in language and multimodal communication
      • Morphosyntaktische Phänomene in den Sprachen der Welt (‘Morphosyntactic phenomena in the languages of the world’)
    • Summer semester 2022:
      • Unsichtbare Sprachen sichtbar machen: Urbane Feldforschung in Düsseldorf (‘Making invisible languages visible: Urban fieldwork in Düsseldorf’) with Niklas Wiskandt
      • Was erklärt die Linguistik? Linguistische Ansätze im Vergleich (‘What does linguistics explain? Linguistic approaches in a comparative perspective’)
    • Winter semester 2021/22:
      • Grammatikalisierung und Sprachwandel (‘Grammaticalization and language change’)
      • Sprachkontakt (‘Language contact’)
    • Summer semester 2021:
      • Linguistic explanations in usage-based and formal approaches
      • Morphosyntaktische Phänomene in den Sprachen der Welt (‘Morphosyntactic phenomena in the languages of the world’)
    • Winter semester 2020/21:
      • Was erklärt die Linguistik? Linguistische Ansätze im Vergleich (‘What does linguistics explain? Linguistic approaches in a comparative perspective’)

Cerence Inc.

March-May 2020: Speech Scientist

  •  I worked on customization of Text-to-Speech (TTS) output according to customer requirements in the automotive area, designing regular expressions for text transformations, creating phonetic transcriptions, and configuring TTS products.

Humboldt University of Berlin and University of Melbourne

2016-2020: Graduate researcher

  • I worked in a team of 6 researchers with whom I collaborated daily, I initiated several international collaborations.
  •  In my PhD project I learned to manage deadlines and task prioritizing.
  •  I taught an MA course (‘Tense-related phenomena in Melanesian languages’) at Humboldt University in which I supervised 4 corpus-based research projects done by students, and subsequently I became an MA thesis supervisor of one of the students. 
  • I have experience with NLP tasks as I used Python (NLTK) and RegEx for searching language corpora, including using corpora annotations, which allowed me to perform formal semantic and pragmatic analyses.
  • I was a PhD representative in a mid-term funding review of my institution, through which I contributed to the positive evaluation and the continuation of the funding.
  • I did fieldwork in Vanuatu where I collected and analyzed speech recordings of the local language called Nafsan.

Project info

  • the project ‘A corpus-based contrastive study of tense, aspect, modality and polarity (TAMP) in Austronesian languages of Melanesia (MelaTAMP)’ (principal investigators: Dr. Kilu von Prince and Prof. Dr. Manfred Krifka) at Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, funded by German Research Foundation (DFG).
  • research and PhD coursework in Melbourne in 2017, funded by Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL)

University of Lisbon

2014-2016: Full-time research assistant

  • I made transcriptions and built a corpus of Malabar Indo-Portuguese, a previously undocumented language, and subsequently created its morphosyntactic and phonological description.

Project info

  • the project ‘Portuguese-based Creoles of the Dravidian Space: Diachrony and Synchrony’ (IF/01009/2012) (principal investigator: Dr. Hugo Cardoso) at Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa (CLUL).

EDUCATION

PhD in Linguistics, joint PhD program at Humboldt University of Berlin and University of Melbourne

2016-2020

  • PhD thesis Tense, mood, aspect expressions in Nafsan (South Efate, Vanuatu) from a typological perspective, supervised by Prof. Manfred Krifka and Prof. Nick Thieberger.

MA in Linguistics, University of Lisbon

2013-2015

  • MA thesis The verbal system of the Indo-Portuguese creoles of the Malabar, supervised by Dr. Hugo Cardoso

BA in Linguistics and Portuguese Language University of Zagreb

2010-2013

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE

Programming: Python (NLTK, SpaCy).

Tools: LaTeX, RegEx, GitHub, Perforce, Terminal environment, Generic Mapping Tools.

Linguistic software: ELAN, FieldWorks, Praat, Audacity, ANNIS.

LANGUAGES

Native: Croatian.

Near-native: English, Portuguese.

Fluent: German (Goethe Certificate B2 level), Bislama.

Basic: Spanish, French.

Research experience: Nafsan and other Oceanic languages, English, Malabar Indo-Portuguese, Portuguese, Malayalam, Croatian, German, Hindi, Latin, Indonesian.

Scripts: Latin, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Arabic.