The current study focuses on Walpole’s social network and the language as contained in the letters of the network members.

Design of a Linguistic System for Interstellar Communication Based on Logic

The largest international conference on English historical linguistics is coming to Leiden. From 7 June to 11 June 2021, the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) organises the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL-21). Due to Covid measures, the conference takes…

This project aims at describing the Khoisan languages !Ora (Korana/Griqua) and !Ui of South Africa.

In this dissertation, a corpus of 595 seventeenth-century letters (mainly private ones) written between 1664 and 1672 is examined from a sociolinguistic perspective.

The main goal of this project is to answer the question: how did Dutch acquire its own, distinctive linguistic characteristics?

Grammatical gender is famously the most puzzling of the grammatical categories. We have a solid typology of gender systems, yet exciting and unexpected patterns keep turning up which defy easy classification and straightforward analysis. Some of these question, stretch or threaten to cross the outer…

This doctoral thesis elaborates Langacker’s reference-point model by applying it to lexical semantics.

The general objective of this thesis is to determine a typology of verbal derivation in Ethiopian Afro-asiatic languages.

This book presents the first comprehensive description of Tafi, one of the fourteen Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages, spoken by approximately 4,400 people in the southeastern part of Ghana. The description consists of thirteen chapters and is based on a corpus gathered during two fieldwork periods…

This 862-page monograph is a grammar of Thangmi, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the districts of Dolakha and Sindhupalcok in central-eastern Nepal.

This project aims at investigating the syntactic role of focus in ellipsis across languages.

This study investigates the syntax and distribution of the two elliptical phenomena Gapping and Fragments, as well as the movements involved in ellipsis contexts in general.

This thesis is a sample-based typological study of formal and semantic patterns in terms for a selection of referring (

In this study, the formation of the Tocharian subjunctive is described, its use and meaning are analysed and its origins are investigated.

This study looks at the diverse phonological systems found within Central Chadic, and reconstructs the phonological system of their ancestor language.

This dissertation provides an up to date description of the Indo European lexical stock of Armenian (ca. 500 entries) with systematic inclusion of unused data that are found in Armenian dialects.

This study presents the first systematic investigation and detailed theoretical analysis of the temporal interpretations of sentences with bare (aspectually unmarked) predicates in Mandarin.

A synchronic description of the endangered Slovene dialect spoken in the Gailtal valley in Carinthia, Austria.

Nowadays, most Europeans speak a language belonging to the Indo-European language family. However, very different languages were spoken on our continent before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. The EUROLITHIC project tries to find answers to the question which languages these were and where they came…

This dissertation provides a thorough review of the words belonging to the oldest layer of Germanic loanwords in Proto-Slavic and answers the question of how these words were adapted to the Proto-Slavic accentual system.

This dissertation investigates the grammar of Makhuwa-Enahara, a Bantu language spoken in the north of Mozambique. The information structure is an influential factor in this language, determining the word order and the use of special conjugations known as conjoint and disjoint verb forms.

This dissertation is a comprehensive description of the Jiăomùzú dialects. These dialects belong to the Tibetan-Birmese language of the rGyalrong spoken in the province Sìchuā, China.

This thesis investigates the syntax of object marking in Sambaa and the Bantu languages in general, with particular focus on Swahili and Haya, as points of comparison.

Umberto Selva, a Leiden graduate of the Research MA program of Linguistics, has received for his thesis the international award for best MA thesis in the field of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics of the year 2015.

This dissertation addresses the semantics of pluractional verbs in Hausa.

On 1 August, Egbert Fortuin has been appointed Professor of Russian Language and Linguistics. After a five-year term as vice-dean of the Faculty Board, he is eager to fully devote himself to the study programme. His appointment can therefore be summarised in three words: 'I am back'.

How did common people write in the late eighteenth century? Little is yet known on this topic, since our knowledge is mainly based on printed texts written by a small part of the (male) elite population. This dissertation – written from a sociolinguistic point of view – gives us new insights into late-…

This dissertation provides an account of polar questions in Italian dialects from a typological, theoretical and empirical perspective.

Dr. Janet Grijzenhout (Universität Konstanz) was appointed Professor English Linguistics and will be working at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL).

ChatGPT, translation machines and bots: for Carole Tiberius, they are a piece of cake. On 1 January, she was appointed professor of Computational Linguistics. 'There ae two elements to the field: computer science and linguistics.'

This research project focuses on the extended documentation and investigation of these non-Austronesian (‘Papuan’) languages.