This dissertation attempts to describe the linguistic history of Hittite on the basis of a systematic etymological treatment of its entire inherited lexicon, precisely analyzing the phonological and morphological developments.

‘If it rains later, then I’ll take the car.’ In order to reason, we use sentences containing ‘if’ every single day. But how does that work exactly in the Dutch language? Alex Reuneker wrote his 628 page dissertation on the subject. Ceremony on 26 January.

This project launches a research program into the theoretical status and the terminological basis of evidentiality systems.

This project focuses on a striking parallelism between two macro-groups of languages: southern Italian dialects and the so-called split-ergative languages, like Basque, Georgian, Dyirbal, Hindi/Urdu.

This project employs a systematic experimental approach to examine the interaction of these two hitherto independent lines of research (tone sandhi and focus realization) in six dialects of Chinese, which lie on a continuum between dialects with dense tonal distributions and sparser distributions. In…

In this research, for the first time a detailed description as well as systematic and comparative analysis of the final particle system in Chinese are provided.

This study explores the role of linguistic data in the reconstruction of Dolgan (pre)history by analyzing contact-induced changes and using them to infer information about the nature of the contact settings in which they occurred.

In the new video series 'The World of Linguistics', alumni and researchers talk about their passion for their field. PhD candidate Meike de Boer knows everything about the word ‘uh’.

In the new video series 'The World of Linguistics', alumni and researchers talk about their passion for their field. Professor of African Linguistics Maarten Mous explains the importance of hearing your language at school.

This thesis investigates the processing of words written in Japanese kanji and Chinese hànzì, i.e. logographic scripts.

This dissertation provides a formal description of the relationship between diatopic/diachronic micro-variation and phonologization through analysis of the phonetic/phonological properties of unstressed vowel reduction and vowel insertion in two Northern Italian dialects.

The main question of this research project concerns the extent to which light verbs in West Germanic languages participate in processes of language change.

The Disticha Catonis by Catenaccio of Anagni. A text in vernacular from Latium (late 13th - early 14th century)

This dissertation provides a comprehensive overview of the grammar of Bantawa, a Kiranti (Rai) language spoken in Eastern Nepal.

Linguist Marian Klamer, associated with Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, is one of the 31 scientists to receive a NWO Vici-grant for her researchproject 'Language as a time machine'.

In this dissertation, the types of context Dutch speakers need to interpret the poly-interpretable word ergens ‘somewhere/anywhere’ are studied.

More than a thousand 17th- and 18th-century Dutch letters from seized ships are now available online. The letters are a gold mine for researchers wanting to study the everyday language used by men and women during this period.

This publication aims at the analysis of the performance of a corpus of Fongbe stories that I collected in three villages in the south of Benin in 1976 and 1977. The corpus consists of 37 stories (57.000 words). The stories aim at children’s education.

Tonal bilinguals of two closely related Chinese dialects are amazing people. They handle two tonal systems in their mind; their two vocabularies are from closely related dialects, and they write translation equivalents with common Chinese characters. Their unique language situation makes their mind…

This dissertation investigates Extended Lexical Units (ELUs), elements that are bigger than just one word and which are stored in the Lexicon.

My research addresses the function of the much-debated particle -nā in Biblical Hebrew, often translated with “please”, from the point of view of the most important ancient Bible translations (Greek, Syriac, Latin). It combines textual criticism, translation technique, discourse pragmatics, and the…

Leiden University researchers have discovered by chance a note from 1783 in Papiamento. They are working on a linguistic study on confiscated Dutch letters. The ‘Letters as loot’ project is headed by Professor Marijke van der Wal.

How would you convert Egyptian hieroglyphs into Latin script? And what is actually the correct translation of dishes on a Vietnamese menu? On Saturday 28 January, high school students from all over the Netherlands will come to Leiden to ponder a series of language-related puzzles. Their goal? To win…

This grammar describes Sumerian, an ancient Near Eastern language which was spoken in what is now southern Iraq, on the basis of written sources dating from about 2500 to 2000 BC.

This study examines the mutual intelligibility between all 225 pairs of 15 Chinese dialects, in two main branches, i.e., six Mandarin dialects and nine non-Mandarin (Southern) dialects.

This thesis aims at contributing to our understanding of the semantic and prosodic properties of object foci in Greek, employing theoretical and experimental tools.

Simulating human language understanding on the computer is a great challenge. A way to approach it is to represent natural language meanings in logic, and to use logical provers to determine what does and does not follow from a text. What logic is best to use and how natural language meanings are best…

This dissertation defends the existence of a type of movement that has so far been considered not to be possible, namely, movement of a bare head to a specifier position over arbitrarily long distances.

This dissertation provides a grammatical description of Ghomara Berber, a Berber language spoken in North-West Morocco by about 10.000 people. The grammar consists of a description of the phonology, the morphology and the syntax. In the appendices a number of texts and a wordlist are included. The data…

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Conference, Meet us in your country

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