Iris Tanza-Kamil

Linguist & Assyriologist

About

I am a linguist and Assyriologist, specialising in formal theoretical and comparative historical linguistics. My main theoretical interest lies in the interfaces of morphology, syntax, and semantics. On the comparative-historical level, I am predominantly interested in Afroasiatic, and particularly Semitic languages.

I hold a BA in (General) Linguistics and an MA in Assyriology (Ancient Near Eastern Philology and Oriental Archaeology) from the University of Vienna. In 2025, I got my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Itamar Kastner and Pavel Iosad. As of 2025, I am a Lady Davis post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

My doctoral dissertation reinvestigates verbal templatic morphology in Akkadian on its interfaces with syntax and (lexical, grammatical, and sentential) semantics. I work more specifically on the encoding of argument structure, causation, and (lexical and grammatical) aspect, which, as I claim, are all deeply intertwined in Akkadian. You can read the dissertation here.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝

More generally, I am interested in the syntax-semantics-morphology-phonology interface cross-linguistically, and am currently developing a formal analytical framework for it; there I focus on the different ways to encode causation and on aspectual systems in language. I am also very passionate about bettering our understanding of Semitic linguistic systems in synchrony and diachrony by combining and developing different methodological frameworks, tailored for the templatic morphology prevalent in Semitic and – partly! – Afroasiatic. Thereby, my main languages of focus are (Babylonian) Akkadian, Modern Hebrew, and Gəʿəz.

One of the first tasks needed to improve our understanding of Semitic (and Afroasiatic) is to unify and make more transparent the way we describe and treat these languages in the literature. In order to create a ground for comparison from which we can then begin a more systematic process of diachronic reconstruction of the language families, I am currently concerned with bringing the morphological analyses of the Semitic verbal systems up to date with the most recent theoretical and typological linguistic theories and analyses. Apart from my dissertation, one effort to bring Semitic and Afroasiatic linguistics further was the organisation of an intermethodological workshop on the Afroasiatic t-morpheme in May 2024. The workshop sought to bring together linguists from different theoretical and methodological foci to present the different Aspect-Voice syncretic functions of the morpheme, and discuss ways in which different theories and approaches could account for such remarkably uniform diachronic developments across different branches Afroasiatic.

In Assyriology, my work thus far focussed on Ancient Near Eastern religion, specifically on Late Babylonian Priestly Literature. I am very interested in epistolary corpora for their insights into the more “natural” registres of Akkadian as well as into Ancient Near Eastern multilingualism.