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 project proposes an integrated and comparative study on the syntactic, semantic, prosodic and processing aspects of in-situ wh-questions, taking the Grammar-parser correspondence hypothesis (Phillips 1996, 2003) as a guiding principle.

To be eligible for Linguistics at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

International scholarly publisher Brill has released the most complete and up-to-date reference work on the Chinese language available today. Prof.dr. Rint Sybesma oversaw the project as Editor-in-Chief.

Maarten Mous, Professor of African Linguistics at Leiden University, looks back on the 50th edition of the Colloquium of African Languages and Linguistics (CALL) and explains why this birthday was a celebration like no other.

On the 22nd of April, Liszt Vianna Neto successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Liszt Vianna Neto on this achievement.

This thesis investigates durational aspects of the Italian mobile diphthongs with respect to other rising diphthongs and monophthongs and it shows to what extent the monophthong/diphthong alternation still occurs in contemporary Italian.

This dissertation provides a grammatical description of the Awjila language, a small Berber language spoken in the Libyan oasis of Awjila.

The master's programme in Linguistics is a one-year programme that offers a wide range of perspectives on the history, structure and use of language, and teaches you to contribute to this broad field in your own area of interest.

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.

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…

Earlier this month, the Europa Institute organized an internal discussion on the German PSPP-judgment. For the first time, the German Constitutional Court declared acts of EU institutions as manifestly excessive and thus as ultra vires acts under German constitutional law. During an online debate, various…

The Leiden Summerschool in Languages and Linguistics, including courses in Papyrology, is now open. BA/MA/PhD students are welcome to attend.

The Hague is the archetypal multicultural city. With a different language spoken on every street corner, this makes it a paradise for linguists such as Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Her book Languages of The Hague is a collection of fascinating conversations with the city’s non-native speakers.

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.

Moritz Jesse, Associate Professor at the Europa Institute in Leiden, provided the key-note lecture at this year’s annual conference of the German-Dutch Lawyers Association. The lecture was titled “The other’s amongst us – Third-Country Nationals and Brits in the EU”.

Recently, the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) issued its second preliminary reference to the Court of Justice of the European Union. Following its earlier reference on the European Central Bank’s bond buying programme Outright Monetary Transactions, the German court now…

Environmental scientist Nadia Soudzilovskaia has been awarded the prestigious, international Bessel-Forschungs prize issued by the Von Humboldt foundation. This German award is issued to outstanding foreign mid-career scientists that collaborate with German researchers. ‘The combination of different…

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

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.

The aim of this research was to establish if Ebeling's semiotactic theory and method of semiotactic analysis, as described in his works Syntax and Semantics (1978), Een Inleiding tot de Syntaxis (1994) and Semiotaxis, over Theoretische en Nederlandse Syntaxis (2006), could be applied to Modern Japanese…

Prof. Dr. Willem Adelaar has been elected as Honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)

Making extensive use of primary source materials this study contributes to existing scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century grammars and grammarians by providing an in-depth study of Ash’s Grammatical Institutes and its influence on other popular grammars for children.

This is a study of Plateau Shimakonde, a sub-dialect of the Makonde language which is spoken on the Makonde Plateau in northern Mozambique.

This thesis presents a thorough survey of the central aspects of the phonology of Shaoxing Chinese from a synchronic perspective and on the basis of recent theoretical phonological developments, with the secondary goal of casting some light on current issues in Modern Chinese (Mandarin).

This dissertation provides a novel perspective on the interaction between quantifier scope and ellipsis. It presents a detailed investigation of the scopal interaction between English negative indefinites, modals, and quantified phrases in ellipsis. One of the crucial observations is that a negative…

This dissertation investigates whether and how gradability is manifested in the nominal domain, as well as the implications this could have for theories of the representation of gradability.

Knowledge and culture subproject 4:

Linguists Alwin Kloekhorst and Alexander Lubotsky from Leiden University made a great discovery this summer. They deciphered a few dozen inscriptions on pot shards found in Daskyleion (North-West Turkey) as Phrygian and Lydian, and thus proved the presence of the Phrygians and Lydians in that area.

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

Painstaking research in Dutch and Portuguese archive materials, so far poorly assessed on the topic of social relations, reveals intense and intricate associations between different European individuals both in terms of ethnicity and social strata.