Dr Alimujiang Tusun
- British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
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About
Dr Alimujiang Tusun is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He did his BA in English at Northwest Minzu University (China), an MA in English and Applied Linguistics at Beijing Foreign Studies University (China), before coming to Cambridge where he did an MPhil (with distinction) and a PhD in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, with a focus on Uyghur (a Turkic language) and Mandarin Chinese, and their acquisition by bilingual children. Upon finishing his PhD, he joined the AHRC-funded project ‘Multilingualism: Empowering individuals and transforming societies (MEITS)’ at Cambridge as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, looking at how factors such as age and context (instructed vs. naturalistic) impact on children’s learning of additional languages. Dr Tusun’s research to date has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Lingua, Linguistics, Frontiers in Psychology, Language and Cognition, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, International Journal of Bilingualism and Journal of Child Language.
Research
Research interests
- Language acquisition
- Multilingualism
- Language typology
- Psycholinguistics
Dr Tusun is interested in the relationship between language and cognition, and he explores this by focusing on how basic human experiential domains such as space and change of state are represented across languages, and how structural diversity (and universality) shape the acquisition of one or more languages by children and adults. He is also interested in the linguistic and philological study of Turkic languages.
Recent publications:
- Tusun, A. (2025). Caused motion events in Uyghur child language. Journal of Child Language, 1-25.
- Tusun, A., Wang, Y. & Abula, A. (2024). Talking motion in an L2 from childhood to adulthood: insights from Uyghur-Chinese early successive bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism, 29(5), 1389-1407.
- Tusun, A. (2024). Voluntary motion events in Uyghur child language. Language, Interaction, and Acquisition, 15(2), 189-214.
- Tusun, A. (2024). Uyghur– Chinese early successive bilingual children’s acquisition of voluntary motion expressions. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 27, 642-654. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728923000780
- Tusun, A. (2023). Uyghur-Chinese adult bilinguals’ construal of caused motion events. Language and Cognition, 15(3), 427-452. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2023.7
- Tusun, A. (2022). Uyghur-Chinese adult bilinguals’ construal of voluntary motion events. Frontiers in Psychology, 13:892346. https://doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.892346.
- Tusun, A. (2022). Motion events in Modern Uyghur narrative discourse. In Chris Shei and Saihong Li (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Asian Linguistics, pp. 93-109. New York: Routledge.
- Tusun, A. & Hendriks, H. (2022). Caused motion events in Uyghur: A typological perspective, Linguistics,60(5), 1663-1705. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0098.
- Tusun, A. & Hendriks, H. (2019). Voluntary motion events in Uyghur: A typological perspective. Lingua, 266:69-88.
Teaching and supervision
Dr Tusun has been doing undergraduate supervisions, since 2014, for various Linguistics courses at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (TAL), University of Cambridge. He also delivers undergraduate lectures in TAL on Language Acquisition and Sociolinguistics, and regularly teaches Second Language Acquisition (MA programme) and Regional Varieties of English (BA programme) at Anglia Ruskin University.