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.

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.

Lexicographical description of Greek; production of Greek-Dutch dictionary

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.

The next Conference on Multilingualism 2019 (COM2019) will be hosted by LUCL from September 1st until September 3rd 2019.

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.

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.

Knowledge and culture subproject 4:

Knowledge and culture subproject 1:

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…

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.

Media & interaction is where artificial intelligence and machine learning meet philosophy, cognitive science, and the creative arts. Examples of research questions in this domain are: 'Can an algorithm be creative by human standards?', 'Can creative processes, such as composing music or writing poetry,…

Peer-mentored cognitive behavioral therapy for adolescents with mild intellectual disability and anxiety disorder

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of the Faculty of Humanities with the University of Hyderabad.

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.

Our research is done at two different locations.

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

Experimental research

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium series

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.

As humans we have a tendency to judge certain actions as either right or wrong. Where does our moral sense come from? We found evidence that infants who are only one year old prefer those who comfort as opposed to ignore another who is sad.

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…

How can we improve quality of life and study success in young, high-functioning adults with autism?

ADHD&ME aims to explore how enhancing self-esteem can break the relation between ADHD symptoms and comorbid disorders, such as anxiety and depression. In this study we assess the effectiveness of a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) program called Competitive Memory Training (COMET) for improving self-esteem…

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.

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

The 10th edition of the World Congress of African Linguists (WOCAL), hosted by Leiden University, will be held online from 7 – 12 June. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) researchers give us an insight into how important and special this event actually is.

Descriptions of different languages help us understand what speakers of different languages share worldwide. At the same time, having descriptions of languages available can also change local education and open our eyes to cultural and linguistic diversity. But what if a language has not yet been (fully)…

On 5 and 6 june 2024, the conference The Senses, Cognition, and the Body in Medieval Devotional Practices is organised at the University of Padova. The organisers welcome abstracts for 25-minute papers in English or Italian, to be submitted by November 30.

Sara Petrollino, a university lecturer in linguistics, strongly believes that language influences the way we see the world. An NWO Open Competition (XS) grant will enable her to test this hypothesis among the Ethiopian Hamar people. ‘The idea that everyone thinks in geometric shapes is culturally de…