Prof. Ass. Dr.

Bujar Rushiti

Bujar Rushiti was born on August 3, 1987, in Prishtina.

Education

• 2006 – 2009: Bachelor’s Degree in English Language and Literature – University of Prishtina, Kosovo
• 2010 – 2011: Master 1 in English Linguistics – Paris Diderot University, France
  Thesis Topic: Hidden Questions in English
  Supervisor: Philip Miller
• 2011 – 2012: Master 2 in English Linguistics – Paris Diderot University, France
  Thesis Topic: Verbal Anaphora in English: do this & do that
  Supervisor: Philip Miller
• 2014 – 2019: PhD in Language Sciences – Paris Diderot University – Laboratory of Formal Linguistics (LLF)
  Dissertation Title: Distributive Marking in Albanian: the Marker nga
  Committee Members:
  • Dissertation Director: Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin (CNRS – Paris 7)
  • Co-director: Dalina Kallulli (University of Vienna)
  • Chair: Lucia Tovena (Professor – Paris 7)
  • Examiner: Patricia Cabredo-Hofherr (CNRS – Paris 8)
  • Reviewer: Hedde Zeijlstra (University of Göttingen)
  • Reviewer: Peter Hallman (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence)

February 27, 2020: Qualified for Assistant Professor (Maître de conférences), Section 7 (General Linguistics), Section 11 (English Linguistics), National Council of Universities, France

Qualification Number: MCF-2020-07-20207315368

Technical Skills

• Programming languages: Python (NLTK, spaCy), R (tidyverse, lme4)
• NLP tools: TreeTagger, Sketch Engine
• Databases: SQL
• Statistics and modeling: Multivariate analysis, mixed-effects models, Bayesian statistics
• Others: Git, LaTeX, large-scale corpus management

Projects and Collaborations

The discourse particles vallë and a thua in Albanian – These particles are used exclusively in interrogative sentences to express the speaker’s epistemic stance toward the proposition. The aim of this project is to construct an Albanian–French bilingual corpus based on the literary works of the renowned Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. The study seeks to describe in detail the distribution, function, and interpretation of these particles in both languages, with a particular focus on identifying how French expresses the speaker’s interrogative stance.

Collaborations

1. Annotating an Albanian Corpus – In recent years, I have closely collaborated with Jean-Louis Duchet (University of Poitiers). Our project involves compiling and annotating an Albanian language corpus. The project is ongoing, and results will be presented once available.
2. Experimental Linguistics – As part of my research, I have contributed to the study of quantification in natural language. This project investigates the interpretation of vague quantifiers such as few, several, many across different languages using experimental linguistic methods. We aim to design acceptability experiments to test native speaker intuitions. The project is in collaboration with Doriane Gras (LaPsyDE – UMR 8240 – Université Paris Cité – CNRS).

Publications

6. Rushiti, B., & Dobrovie-Sorin, C. (2021). Superlatives and definiteness in Albanian. Scolia. Revue de linguistique, (35), 125–140.
7. Rushiti, B., & Dobrovie-Sorin, C. (2024). Distributive numerals in Albanian. Journal of Linguistics, 60(4), 889–919.
8. Rushiti, B. (2024). The discourse particle vallë in Albanian. Journal of Pragmatics, 231, 19–34.
9. Rushiti, B., & Gras, D. (forthcoming). On the monotonic constraint of the distributive marker nga in Albanian and Beyond. Accepted for publication in Glossa – Journal of General Linguistics.

Teaching Experience

Lecturer in English and General Linguistics
Jan 2021 – Present – AAB University – Prishtina, Kosovo

Courses taught:

• Semantics and pragmatics of English
• Introduction to linguistics
• Morphology
• English stylistics
• Cognitive grammar
• Sociolinguistics

Contract Lecturer
Nov 2019 – Sept 2020 – University of Le Havre – Normandy, France

Lecturer in Language Sciences
Sept 2019 – Dec 2019 – Paris Diderot University
Course: Introduction to Semantics (Lectures by Lucia Tovena; Exercises by Bujar Rushiti)
Main textbook: Saeed, J. (2016). Semantics (4th ed.), Blackwell

Lecturer in English
Feb – Jun 2019 – Télécom Paris Sud
Course: Academic Writing
Objectives: (a) Understand the purposes of academic writing; (b) Apply revision processes to improve written communication

Lecturer in English
2017–2018 – Paris 8 University
Courses: Economic and International English; General English

Lecturer in English
2017–2018 – Paris 13 University
Course: English Grammar (Topics: quantifiers, determiners, indefinites, noun phrases, adverbs, articles)

ATER (Teaching and Research Assistant)
2015–2017 – INALCO (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations)
Courses: English Grammar; Academic English

Lecturer
2014–2015 – EILA – Paris Diderot University
Course: University English for Non-Specialists (Grammar and Scientific English)

Lecturer at INALCO
2012–2014 – INALCO
Course: University English for Non-Specialists

Lecturer
2009–2010 – Cambridge School of English – Prishtina, Kosovo
Course: General English and Integrated Skills

Conference Presentations

• Distant distribution in Albanian: the case of nga – February 2015, CNRS Porte Pouchet
• Distant distribution with pseudo-partitives in Albanian – February 2017, CNRS Pouchet
• A feature-checking analysis of distributive marking in Albanian – February 2019, ConSOLE, Humboldt University, Berlin
• Distributive numerals in Balkan languages – April 2019, Balkan Linguistics Seminar, Inalco, Paris
• Distributive agreement in Albanian – June 2019, Formal and Theoretical Linguistics Conference, University of Nantes
• Definite article in superlatives in Romance and Albanian – June 2022, Colloquium on Generative Grammar, Balearic Islands University
• Epistemic indefinites in Albanian and beyond – September 2023, Indefinites and Semantics Conference, CNRS – Pouchet
• Distributive numerals in Albanian and beyond – November 2023, Distributive Numerals Conference, CNRS – Pouchet
• The co-occurrence of the discourse particles vallë and a thua in Albanian – September 2024, Languages and Language at the Crossroads of Disciplines, Sorbonne University

Grants and Fellowships

• LABEX – EFL Grant (September 2015) – Outgoing Mobility – Vienna, Austria
• LABEX – EFL Grant (July 2015) – Thematic Training – LSA Summer Institute, Chicago, USA

Additional Skills

• Languages: Albanian (native), English (C2), French (C2)
• Software: LaTeX, Ibex Farm

Ongoing Research Project

Bujar is currently developing a research project on negative concord in Albanian. The term “concord” in this context refers to cases where elements that usually bear a negative meaning become semantically vacuous in certain syntactic environments.