You can ask virtual assistant Siri about the weather, but you can’t have a real conversation with it yet. You can’t refer to anything that’s been said before, or ask the system why it says what it says. Stephan Raaijmakers, Professor by Special Appointment from TNO, hopes to change this.

This dissertation investigates the interaction of aspect and subjectivity in modal constructions.

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

This dissertation investigates A'-dependencies in Standard German, Zurich German and Dutch where the dislocated constituent is indirectly, i.e. not transformationally, related to the position where it is interpreted. The analysis is carried out within the Principles & Parameters framework.

Professor Felix Ameka and university lecturer Maria del Carmen Parafita Couta have received an NWO Open Competition grant together with Enoch Aboh (University of Amsterdam) to do research on ‘code-switching’: switching languages by multilinguals.

The MA Classics and Ancient Civilizations covers one year and can be studied in four tracks: Classics is one of them. While diving into the literary, cultural and intellectual worlds of Greece and Rome, you will be involved in current research, and stimulated to reflect on the significance of Classics…

Study information

Professor Jenny Doetjes has received an NWO grant to research the cross-linguistic properties of quantity expressions and our brain's influence on language.

Conference, Meet us in your country

Conference, Meet us in your country

Conference, Meet us in your country

Conference, Meet us in your country

Communication is the transmission of information. All day long we are busy explaining and making things clear to each other, but exactly how we do that varies from language to language. Associate Professor Jenneke van der Wal delved into African Bantu languages for a Vidi project.

Lecture, This Time For Africa! series

Conference, Meet us in your country

Conference, Meet us in your country

Conference, Meet us in your country

This work provides a typologically oriented description of clause linkage strategies in Ket, a highly endangered language spoken in Central Siberia. It is now the only surviving member of the Yeniseian language family with the last remaining speakers residing in the north of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk pro…

This dissertation addresses the semantics of pluractional verbs in Hausa.

Professor Roberta D’Alessandro, Chair of Italian Language and Culture at the Leiden University, has been awarded one of Italy’s highest honors: she is now a Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy (Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella d'Italia). D’Alessandro was presented with the honor on June 2, the…

Discover history and present. With it's eventful history and politics, Russia is a country with a large influence on Europe and the world. In the Dutch-taught Bachelor's programme Russian Studies you will learn everything about the culture, language and politics of the largest country in the world and…

This dissertation focuses on the question how text and paratext contribute to the way that text in a network-like environment is clearly bordered and at the same time can easily be linked to other texts.

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…

In comparing a selection of 18th-century histories to a representative sample of 19th-century histories of science, this project inquires: Which early modern vices persisted into the 19th century and to what extent were those vices embodied in anecdotes, conveyed through commonplaces, or symbolically…

Operators in the Lexicon opens with an old chestnut: why are there no natural single word lexicalizations for negations of the propositional operator and and the predicate calculus operator all: why neither *nand nor *nall?

This project analyzes to what extent hodegetical textbooks relied on each other in warning their readers against vicious habits, how much continuity their catalogs of vice displayed, and to what extent vices that persisted throughout the 18th and 19th centuries were associated with easy-to-remember…

Lecture

The presents thesis investigates the extent to which Chinese, Dutch and American speakers of English are mutually intelligible. Intelligibility of vowels, simplex consonants and consonant clusters was tested in meaningless sound sequences, as well as in words in meaningless and meaningful short sent…

For his PhD project, computer scientist Manolis Fragkiadakis is developing a tool that can compare videos of sign language corpora. This would make it possible to detect differences between sign languages and prevent translation errors. Ultimately, the tool could be used to compare sign languages from…

Tingting Hui started her PhD project at LUCAS in September 2015. Her promotors will be Ernst van Alphen and Yasco Horsman from the Literary Studies department.

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According to Nivja de Jong, second language acquisition is 'the most fascinating subject in linguistics'. As a recently appointed professor of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy, she studies the question of how best to teach people a new language.

Study information

What developments preceded modern Standard Dutch? PhD candidate Iris Van de Voorde conducted research on ‘pluricentricity’, or the idea that language norms arise in different places and spread outwards from there. PhD defence on 19 April.

From Sunday 11 till Tuesday 20 June 2023, NVIC organizes a new edition of the TAFL course. This intensive, interactive course is developed for (future) teachers of Arabic. It addresses both the practical aspects of teaching Arabic as a foreign language as well as the underlying linguistic and cognitive…

From Sunday 8 till Tuesday 17 January 2023, NVIC organizes a new edition of the TAFL course. This intensive, interactive course is developed for (future) teachers of Arabic. It addresses both the practical aspects of teaching Arabic as a foreign language as well as the underlying linguistic and cognitive…

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.

Endangered languages can survive if they are taught properly to new speakers, such as people with a migrant background. This is what Professor by Special Appointment Felix Ameka will say in his inaugural lecture on 30 September. Dutch people can do their bit by being less ‘polite’ to people whose mother…

On the 4th of September, Elisabeth J. Kerr successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Elisabeth on this achievement!

When Daan van Esch, master’s student in Chinese Studies, travelled through China last summer, he noticed that he often did not understand what the inhabitants of the different villages and cities were talking about. There turned out to be huge differences within the language. He decided to map this…

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.

By analysing neglected (continental) spy centres and integrating these groups of female intelligencers into the traditional, male-orientated historical narratives, this project will proceed towards a gendered history of early modern espionage.

What made the early Islamic empire so successful and have we missed the story by neglecting crucial evidence? The 7th-century Arab conquests changed the socio-political configurations in the Mediterranean and Eurasia forever. Yet we do not really know how the Arabs managed to gain dominance of this…

This study relates the vicissitudes of the Amerindian peoples who lived or still inhabit the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, from the earliest occupants, ca. 8000 BC, until at present.

How do you make niche subjects interesting and accessible? Benjamin Suchard, historical linguist and researcher, seems to have created the perfect recipe, which consists of his various projects alongside his regular research, including a Twitter account and a major international film.

In 2014 Russia entered Ukraine and occupied Crimea, and about two and a half years ago it began a large-scale invasion. For Ukraine, it’s a war. But Russia calls it a ‘special military operation’. Word choices of this kind affect how people look at issues. A Dutch Research Council (NWO) project led…

How does the human mind work when it comes to language? Why are some speeches totally persuasive, and others less so? How do children acquire language so effortlessly? How do languages develop over the course of time? How many different speech sounds can humans make? During your BA in Linguistics you…

Victoria Nyst's love for sign language was sparked when she accidentally ended up at a deaf school while studying African linguistics. The university lecturer has since been awarded a Vici grant to research the history of these languages.