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.

This PhD project investigates how nationalist ideas are expressed, shaped, and negotiated in Moroccan Malhun poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Feature Co-occurrence Constraint theory proposed in this dissertation provides a means to capture the development of the language learning child's segment inventory.

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium

The earlier you introduce children to a language, the sooner they can be captivated by it and see that there is more than just Dutch and English. That is the basis for the language lessons for primary education that Alisa van de Haar, university lecturer of French, collaborated on. ‘Deans from different…

This engagingly written textbook provides a unique 'hands-on' introduction to sociolinguistics, which equips readers with the tools to start their own sociolinguistic research project.

They first entered the Academy Building fifty to sixty years ago. On 28 March, they were back for an afternoon: the members of the Dr Pfiffikus debating society of the German Studies programme. Former chair Hans van der Veen looks back on his student days.

You've earned your degree and you’re ready to start your career. But where do you end up?

Study information

‘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.

This PhD project investigates the different uses of Mandarin

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.

Study information

Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study.

Study information

If you had something important to write down in ancient times, you would usually write in Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. University lecturer Joanne Stolk has been awarded an ERC grant to explore the kinds of spelling mistakes that were made in these scripts. And, more importantly, what improvements…

Speech Prosody 2024 includes seven special sessions. When making a submission, authors are asked to indicate whether they want their paper to be considered for a special session. You can find descriptions of each below.

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

Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies.

This interdisciplinary research project explores several adaptive machine learning methods which can give insight into the interaction between human and machine. The ultimate goal is open and natural communication between humans and AI that should result in mutual trust, cooperation and coordination…

Conference, NEAR-ER Summer School

Promotor: F.S. de Boer Co-promotor: P. T. de Gouw

Do you want to discover a language and culture that is completely different from the Netherlands?

Nivja de Jong, researcher at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) and the Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching (ICLON), has won the 2018 Best Article Award from the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) for her paper on language fluency. The award committee writes…

You can ask virtual assistant Siri about the weather, but you can’t have a real conversation with it yet. You can’t refer to anything that’s been said before, or ask the system why it says what it says. Stephan Raaijmakers, Professor by Special Appointment from TNO, hopes to change this.

This project seeks to integrate scientific research and practical knowledge in the study of the mechanisms that make dialogue an effective tool for communication, teaching, and thinking.

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…

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.

This special issue explores social meaning from the perspective of current theories in pragmatics.

How do you make niche subjects interesting and accessible? Benjamin Suchard, historical linguist and researcher, seems to have created the perfect recipe, which consists of his various projects alongside his regular research, including a Twitter account and a major international film.

On the 13th of February, Matthew Sung successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Matthew on this achievement!

From Sunday 11 till Tuesday 20 June 2023, NVIC organizes a new edition of the TAFL course. This intensive, interactive course is developed for (future) teachers of Arabic. It addresses both the practical aspects of teaching Arabic as a foreign language as well as the underlying linguistic and cognitive…

From Sunday 8 till Tuesday 17 January 2023, NVIC organizes a new edition of the TAFL course. This intensive, interactive course is developed for (future) teachers of Arabic. It addresses both the practical aspects of teaching Arabic as a foreign language as well as the underlying linguistic and cognitive…

Study information

Ancient Greek is well-known for displaying relatively free word order. This dissertation examines word order variation in the Koine Greek of the New Testament Greek in a variety of domains: declarative clauses, questions and relative clauses. In particular, I examine the way in which word order corresponds…

Descriptive linguistics at LUCL covers documentation and descriptive analysis of lesser-studied languages as well as typological and historical comparison.

On the 23rd of March, Alessandro del Tomba successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Alessandro on this achievement!