The VICI research project Citizenship Discourses in the Early Middle Ages, led by Els Rose (Universiteit Utrecht), published a new book: Els Rose, Robert Flierman en Merel de Bruin-van de Beek, red., City, Citizen, Citizenship, 400–1500. A Comparative Approach (Londen: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2024). It…

In 2019, Aliaksandr Lukashenka marks a quarter of a century as the first, and so far only president of the Republic of Belarus. This new book by Dr. Matthew Frear, Assistant Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies, offers the most up-to-date analysis of government and politics in a country usually…

The city centre of Leiden is covered in them: wall poems. When roaming around, you come across poetry written in the Latin alphabet, but also in scripts that might be more difficult to understand for the average person living in Leiden. In a new series of videos, Tijmen Pronk talks more about this.

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…

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…

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

The Executive Board has decided to appoint Dr. Antoaneta Dimitrova as Professor Comparative Governance within the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, starting on 1 September 2017.

What can languages spoken in the Lesser Sunda Islands today tell us about the histories of its various population groups?

Ever since the foundation of Leiden University in 1575, philosophy in Leiden has been committed to open-mindedness, dialogue, and comparative perspectives. In line with this tradition it makes perfect sense to question the widespread self-image of philosophy as well. Is philosophy the exclusive privilege…

The project '‘The Temporality of Images: Merleau-Ponty’s Visual Ontology and its Resonances with Chinese Landscape Painting.’, in the most concise terms, explores ontological questions through the lens of images, drawing on phenomenology, iconology, art history, and comparative philosophy.

This project explores how Muslim authorities and writers use Russian to transmit Islamic contents, and whether this leads to a specific

The Leiden University Bachelor's programme in Philosophy features philosophical traditions from around the globe. Traveling through space and time, from Europe and Iran to India and China, and from Antiquity to the present day, you will learn how to challenge unquestioned patterns of thought, and how…

In this research project, the protection of personal data is compared in eight EU member states: France, Germany, the UK, Ireland, Romania, Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands. The comparison of the countries is focused on government policies for the protection of personal data, the applicable laws and…

This dissertation aims at discussing the nature and the linguistic factors assumed responsible for speech intelligibility problems of Sudanese learners of English.

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 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…

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

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.

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.

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’.

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…

How did Scottish speakers sound hundreds of years ago? University lecturer Mo Gordon thinks the answer to that question can be found in church archives. 'It can be a boost to your identity to know the history of your language.'

University lecturer Alex Reuneker has won the Frans van Eemeren Prize for his paper 'Assessing classification reliability of conditionals in discourse'.

University lecturer Lucien van Beek has been awarded a LUF Praesidium Libertatis Grant. He will use the sum of 75,000 euros to research the thinking of people in ancient and prehistoric times. To do that, he will look for unusual or striking metaphors in the earliest Indo-European languages.

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

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'.

LUCL is pleased to announce that two Vrije Competitie Grants have been awarded to LUCL researchers. Prof.dr. Lisa Cheng and dr. Jenny Doetjes have been awarded a grant for their project 'Understanding questions'. Prof.dr. Michael Kemper (UvA) and prof.dr. Jos Schaeken have been awarded a grant for the…

Historiography of science is in its current self-image a non-evaluative discipline. Its main goal is to understand past processes of knowledge formation on their own terms. In the last few decades this approach has greatly improved our understanding of the phenomenon of science. Yet, something strange…

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.

In this dissertation a large corpus of letter signs and texts gathered during fieldwork in Niger, and to a lesser extent Mali and Burkina Faso is used to show the graphemic diversity of the traditional script of the Tuaregs, tifinagh, and to analyze the orthographic system.

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.

Conference

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

Leiden University is happy to announce that it has won a prestigious Jean Monnet grant for a Centre of Excellence. The Centre, called CompaRe, focusses on comparative regional integration.

On 13-14 October, Dr. Joris Larik, Assistant Professor for Comparative, EU, and International Law at LUC, took part in the Duke-Pretoria Conference on Comparative Foreign Relations Law. During these two days in the South African capital, draft chapters for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Comparative…

Language can be a time machine: we can learn from ancient texts how our ancestors interacted with the world around them. But can language also teach us something about people whose language has been lost? PhD candidate Anthony Jakob investigated whether the languages of prehistoric populations left…

As of 1 June 2018 Olaf van Vliet has been appointed as Professor of Comparative Welfare State Analysis at Leiden University. The Endowed Chair in Comparative Welfare State Analysis is supported by Instituut Gak. This chair is embedded in both the Department of Economics (Leiden Law School) and the Institute…

‘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.

In this article, Gerrit Dijkstra and Jos Raadschelders from the Institute of Public Administration, argue that Bosnia-Herzegovina survives so far on the basis of negative legitimacy.

Sofia Ranchordas (1985) has been appointed Chair European and Comparative Public Law and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen. She will start this position on October 1st.

Latin America has seen multiple waves of regional integration, with various levels of success. The last wave foundered after the rise of nationalist politicians. But new developments require a reconsideration, including a number of new, more collaborative-minded presidents coming to power and urgent…

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…

In a conversation, you provide all sorts of information to the listener. For example, you can indicate that you're certain about something, or that you heard it through someone else. Associate Professor Jenneke van der Wal has been awarded a Vici grant to investigate whether the way people do this is…

Poster session

Fondazione 1563 launched a call for the Summer School of the Turin Humanities Programme, that will take place in Torino from September 6 to September 8 2023. The theme is: Writing global medieval history: comparative and connected approaches. Deadline for applications: June 25.