PD Dr. Frank Seifart is a senior researcher in the Research Area 3 'Syntax & Lexicon'. He works on a Heisenberg position in his projekt New empirical linguistics through integration of language documentation, comparative corpus linguistics, typology and language contact research (Empi-Ling). He was also PI in the ANR-DFG project DoReCo - Cross-linguistic phonetics and morphology using a time-aligned multilingual reference corpus built from documentations of 50 languages: Big data on small languages, is editor of the DoReCo database and heads the AP 2.1 of the BMBF joint project Quest: Quality - Established: Testing and application of curation criteria and quality standards for audiovisual, annotated language data.
Frank Seifart has been a private lecturer at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since December 2020.

How different are the approximately 7,000 currently spoken languages on the level of sound, form and meaning and where are the limits of diversity? Which processes lead to the differentiation and harmonisation of languages? Frank Seifart works on these questions with the help of databases, documentary linguistics and multimedia corpora, which he evaluates qualitatively and quantitatively. He focuses on comparative morphosyntax, semantics and prosody; language history and contact; and the Amazon languages Bora and Resígaro.