This project launches a research program into the theoretical status and the terminological basis of evidentiality systems.

This thesis, conducted in the framework of ERC Starting grant project BABYLON (PI: Caroline Waerzeggers), presents an investigation into Babylonian society, focusing on the city of Borsippa during Neo-Babylonian and early Persian rule (c. 620-484 BCE).

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…

Stylianos Irakleous defended his thesis on 6 February 2020

Brain research and statistics are advancing our understanding of language and language acquisition. Linguists are still essential, however, says Professor of Dutch Linguistics Sjef Barbiers. Inaugural lecture on 8 December.

The research programme Language Use in Past and Present brings together linguists within LUCL whose central focus is both on actual language data, including language use in earlier stages of the language, and, taking a variationist perspective, on language change in various aspects.

Dutch universities involved in lingusitics research and teaching have been asked through the VSNU to provide financial guarantees for the transition of linguistics research to open access. The universities, including Leiden, have agreed.

New Approaches to Understanding the Eastern Mediterranean during Byzantine and Ottoman Times

To what extent are individuals socialised with heteronormativity and gender norms by the national context in which they live, by Dutch schoolbooks, and within Dutch families?

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…

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.

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.

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

This is a Special Issue of the peer-reviewed journal 'Social Sciences and Missions', which provides a forum for exploration of the social and political influence of Christian missions worldwide.

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.

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.

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.

On the 19th of November, Tingting Zheng successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Tingting on this achievement!

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…

After having been cancelled in 2020, this year the Summer School in Languages and Linguistics is going online. From 12 – 23 July, language and linguistics enthusiasts from all over the world can once again learn about a variety of rare languages and linguistics topics. Director Sasha Lubotsky tells…

For this project we delve into children's digital media use during the transition from kindergarten to group 3 and investigate its impact on their social development.

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.

Studying one another’s languages and cultures fosters understanding between groups of people, which leads to more equality, along with increased economic, administrative, and cultural cooperation.

Russia recently blew up a defect satellite. As a result, the amount of space debris in Earth orbit has increased.

This paper written by Vydra and Kantorowicz answers the research question ‘What policy-relevant information does Twitter contain?’ as well as the research question ‘How does this information change between a period of normalcy and a period of crisis?’

How did the slave peculium function in the socio-legal context of the Roman Empire?

Written by a select international group of leading privacy scholars, Social Dimensions of Privacy endorses and develops an innovative approach to privacy.

Sanne Kellij and colleagues systematically reviewed 142 articles, examining evidence for three hypotheses on the relation between victimization and social information processing.

The author researched the motivations of bureaucrats to integrate refugees into welfare services even when they do not have any legal obligation to do so.

This project focuses on a striking parallelism between two macro-groups of languages: southern Italian dialects and the so-called split-ergative languages, like Basque, Georgian, Dyirbal, Hindi/Urdu.

When it comes to languages and cultures, Leiden University is the university. The global expertise present places our university at the top. In Leiden and The Hague, we study languages and cultures from all regions of the world and from prehistory to the present day. In this way we create a broad view…

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.

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…

Robotics, using social mechanisms like hormonal modulation, may accelerate our understanding of core sociality principles. By looking at social robotics through an evolutionary lens, we propose this field as a promising framework to investigate the fundamental bricks of sociality from an evolutionary…

The availability of indicators based on social media has opened the possibility to track the online interactions between social media users and scholarly entities.

Lecture

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.