On October 31st, Paul Noorlander succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Paul on this great result.

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

This thesis investigates the grammar of Gaahmg, a Nilo-Saharan, Eastern Sudanic language spoken in the Blue Nile Province of North Sudan. The comprehensive description provides an analysis of the phonology, morphology, and syntax. Ten texts of various genre are given to help illustrated the grammar…

Dr Jenny Doetjes was appointed Professor of Semantics and Language Variation in February. During her professorship Dr. Doetjes wishes to focus on charting linguistic patterns between languages that, at first glance, seem to have little to do with each other.

On the 24th of October, Nurenzia Yannuar successfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Nurenzia on this achievement.

What is the effect of a dynamic training in children’s inductive reasoning skills and how is it related to children’s school performances and language development.

The main aim of this project is to provide a full analysis of the actual influence of French on Dutch in The Netherlands during the period of 1500 - 1900.

On the 26th of September, Cosmas Rai Amenorvi successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Cosmas on this achievement!

If idioms employed in codes of conduct could be as idiosyncratic as examples suggest, then to what extent did early modern language of vice, too, persist in this genre?

What evaluative languages (errors, mistakes, vices, etc.) did book reviewers employ? To what extent and on what occasions did they invoke early modern vices? And to what extent did this differ across fields or change over the course of the century?

Dissertation

Knowledge and culture subproject 1:

Language research generates a wealth of information about people: from our history and cultural differences to the way we learn. Leiden University shares its knowledge and passion for this topic via de MOOC on ‘Miracles of Human Languages’ and the web dossier on Language Diversity.

On the 6th of November, Niels Schoubben successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Niels on this achievement!

This thesis discusses the constructions relevant to Object Shift from the intonational perspective, by presenting experimental data from all the Scandinavian languages.

The ‘empathic mind’ in children with Specific Language Impairments (SLI); what can children with SLI understand of other people’s minds and emotions?

This project will study the cultural meaning of the mythological figure of Orestes within the ancient Greek imagination, as it emerges from various literary sources from the archaic and classical periods.

We live in a data-drenched society awash with numbers. An inhabitant of the democratic polis of Athens (5th and 4th centuries B.C.E.) increasingly found himself surrounded by numerical data. This project aims to analyze the communicative functions and the political meaning(s) ascribed to these public…

From Crisis to Critique

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.

Conference

In this project, the hypothesis that language contact crucially impacts the development of spatial grammar and phonology is investigated.

Will Leiden be the first city to have wall poems in sign language? It will, if sign language researcher Victoria Nyst has her way. She recently started a crowdfunding campaign together with the Leiden Language Museum and the TEGEN-BEELD Foundation.

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…

Conference

How is social cognition shaped by our knowledge of language and stories?

In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French…

Conference

Haunted Europe offers a comprehensive account of the British and Irish fascination with a Gothic vision of continental Europe, tracing its effect on British intellectual life from the birth of the Gothic novel, to the eve of Brexit, and the symbolic recalibration of the UK’s relationship to mainland…

PhD defence

On 5 October, Katherine Filesia defended the thesis 'Speaking the same language: the introduction of the Anglo-American trust into the Dutch legal system'. The doctoral research was supervised by Pim Huijgen and Frans Sonneveldt.

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…

During the first year of life, babies adapt to the language they hear around them. In the event of hearing difficulties, this can lead to a language deficiency, which is not so easy to resolve, says Professor of English Linguistics Janet Grijzenhout. Inaugural lecture 19 March.

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

Like spoken languages, sign languages evolve organically and do not always have the same origin. This produces different ways of communication and annotation. Manolis Fragkiadakis wrote his PhD thesis on this.

The fragmentary is everywhere: we encounter fragments in social media (Tiktok, Twitter), in personal memories from our childhood, and in traditions from our cultural heritage.