On December 12th, Andreas Krogull succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Andreas on this great result.

On the 23rd of September, George Saad successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates George on this achievement!

Computational linguistics uses computational methods to help answer linguistics questions across a variety of topics.

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-…

Lecture, Workshop

The Indonesian Experience after the Fall of Suharto

PhD Defence

In this dissertation, electrophysiological (EEG) and behavioural measures are used to investigate how allophonic tonal variants and sub-phonemic features are processed during Mandarin and Dutch speech production, visual processing of written words and reading aloud.

How do common marmosets combine their calls into sequences and how are their vocalisations influenced by reproductive state?

How do crises produce changes in specific European Union foreign policy areas, and how should we conceptualise these policy changes?

This project examines how speakers store and process regular pitch variation.

When researching languages in historical context, our goal is to understand the nature of linguistic variation in the past, and explain the extent to which the socio-cultural context of bygone times contributed to shaping linguistic variation and change.

On November 22nd, Morana Lukač succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Morana on this great result.

On the 12th of December, Eleanor Dutton successfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Eleanor on this achievement.

Isis on the Nile. Egyptian gods in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt

This project investigates the influence that Arabic (esp. dialectal Arabic) has had on the Berber languages of Northern Africa.

Like any language, the natural sign languages of deaf communities differ from each other in their grammars and lexicons. A growing number of studies indicates that sign languages make use of the gestures of hearing speakers to build linguistic structure. This implies that variation and similarities…

Like any language, the natural sign languages (henceforth: SLs) of deaf communities differ from each other in their grammars and lexicons. A growing number of studies indicates that SLs make use of the gestures of hearing speakers to build linguistic structure. This implies that variation and similarities…

This thesis describes the use of the evolutionary approach in the study of language change, aiming to provide a better insight in the mechanisms that play a role in language change and to validate this approach in the field of language change.

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

On the 10th of February, Qian Li succesfully defended her PhD-thesis and graduated. LUCL congratulates Qian on this great result.

Novel algorithms to detect indels and structural variants from next- and third-generation sequencing data.

PhD Defence

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.

Language offers new insights into our history, cultural differences, migration, and the way in which our brain processes information. This knowledge can in turn help us understand what it means to be human, as well as opening the way to many practical applications. In order to realise these goals, linguists…

PhD Defence

A tidal basin is an inland sea which is almost entirely enclosed by land and connected to the open sea by a tidal inlet. Through the tidal inlets interaction takes place between the tidal basin and the open sea.

This book contextualises case studies across a wide variety of languages and cultures, crystallising key interrelationships between linguistic standardisation and prescriptivism, and between ideas and practices. It focuses on different traditions of standardisation and prescription throughout the world…

My artistic practice deals with documents and, more specifically, with the use and the exploration of their narrative potential.

Fokelien Kootstra defended her thesis on 23 April 2019

Chinese Linguistics at Leiden University offers you an excellent opportunity to concentrate on the different aspects of the languages of China, especially their sounds and syntax.

Promotores: Prof.dr. P.M. Brakefield, Prof.dr. B.J. Zwaan (Wageningen Universiteit)

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.

The present investigation aims at exploring whether the instruction provided at secondary schools in the capital meets the requirements of Communicative Language Teaching and whether the aims of improving learners’ communicative proficiency are met.

This dissertation is an analysis of spelling variation in Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, two early texts of The Canterbury Tales.

My PhD thesis investigates the ecological significance of resistance against drought-induced air bubble formation inside the water conduits of plants (embolism), and the plasticity and functional aspects of stem anatomical traits in woody and herbaceous species.

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.

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…

The ultimate aim of the project is to find out whether there are such things as

This thesis develops statistical methods for the analysis of high dimensional data: high dimensional networks reconstruction (Chapters 1-4), incorporation of prior information in networks reconstruction (Chapters 2-4), incorporation of prior knowledge in genetic association studies (Chapter 3).

What does site patterning reveal about the social landscape dynamics across the historical divide?

The main question of this research project concerns the extent to which light verbs in West Germanic languages participate in processes of language change.

On the 13th of October, Cesko Voeten successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Cesko on this achievement!

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