Jóhanna Barðdal has her first degree from the University of Iceland and her Ph.D. degree from Lund University, Sweden (2001). She has held visiting appointments at Manchester University, University of North Texas and University of California at Berkeley. Jóhanna was a Postdoctoral Researcher (2003–2008), an acting Associate Professor (2006), and later a Research Associate Professor (2008–2013) at the University of Bergen, Norway. Jóhanna has held an Affilate Associate Professorship at Lund University since 2004 (compatible to Habilitation in Europe) and an Affilate Full Professorship at the University of Iceland since 2015. She joined the Dept. of Linguistics at Ghent University in the fall 2013.
Jóhanna has taught advanced intensive courses at the University of the Faroe Islands (2012), Leiden Winter School (2013), Charles University, Prague (2013), the University of Rioja, Logroño (2014), University of Pavia & University of Bergamo (2015), Verona University (2016), the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (2020) and the Fluminense Federal University, Brazil (2020, cancelled).
Jóhanna's research is focused on case marking and its development, the relation between case marking and verbal semantics, argument structure, syntactic functions, non-nominative subjects, form–meaning correspondences, productivity and variation in case marking and argument structure, historical–comparative linguistics, diachronic construction grammar, as well as syntactic and semantic reconstruction.
During Jóhanna's career, she has authored three research monographs and coauthored one reference grammar: Case in Icelandic: A Synchronic, Diachronic and Comparative Approach (2001), Productivity: Evidence from Case and Argument Structure in Icelandic (2008), Oblique Subjects in Germanic: Their Status, History and Reconstruction (2023), and Nordiska – Våra språk förr och nu [Scandinavian – Our Languages Now and Earlier] (1997).
Jóhanna is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Historical Linguistics and a founding series editor of Brill’s Studies in Historical Linguistics. She has published in several linguistics journals, including Language, Journal of Linguistics, Linguistics, Nordic Journal of Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Constructions and Frames, Studies in Language, Functions of Language, Morphology, Lingua, STUF: Language Typology and Universals, Diachronica, Transactions of the Philological Society, Language Dynamics and Change, Folia Linguistica Historica, Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, NOWELE: North-Western Language Evolution, Journal of Indo-European Studies, Journal of Greek Linguistics, Indogermanische Forschungen and Historische Sprachforschung.
Jóhanna's research has hitherto been funded by the Icelandic Research Council (RANNÍS), the Norwegian Research Council (NFR), Bergen Research Foundation (BFS), STINT (Sweden), the Crawford Foundation (Sweden), Birgit and Gad Rausing Foundation (Sweden), as well as by the European Research Council (ERC Consolidator Grant). Jóhanna is currently directing a research project funded by Ghent University Special Research Fund and codirecting two others, funded by the Research Council of Flanders and by Ghent University Special Research Fund.
Recently, Jóhanna was awarded an in-residence fellowship at NIAS: The Netherlandic Institute for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Hence, Jóhanna spent a research period at NIAS in Amsterdam in the spring 2020, working on a monograph on the subject properties of oblique subjects in the Early Germanic languages.
