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.

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.

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…

How did “free agents” (entrepreneurs operating outside of the myriad of interests of the centralized, state-sponsored monopolies) in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire react to the creation of colonial monopolies (royal monopolies and chartered companies) by the central states in the Early Modern…

This dissertation investigates the grammar of Makhuwa-Enahara, a Bantu language spoken in the north of Mozambique. The information structure is an influential factor in this language, determining the word order and the use of special conjugations known as conjoint and disjoint verb forms.

This dissertation investigates the interaction of aspect and subjectivity in modal constructions.

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.

This volume offers a multidisciplinary view of cutting-edge research on bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, with the aim of building a bridge between sub-fields and approaches that often find themselves isolated from one another.

The present study comprises a classification and analysis of the syntax of the non-verbal clause in Qumran Hebrew, i.e. the linguistic variety (or varieties) found in the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls. The corpus consists of the non-biblical texts written in Hebrew; biblical texts and texts written in…

The project Going Dutch investigates why the link between being or becoming Dutch, and knowledge of Standard Dutch is so often taken for granted in public discourse, by diving into its historical roots.

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 addresses the semantics of pluractional verbs in Hausa.

This dissertation presents the first full grammatical description of bago ts'amakkilo ('mouth of the Ts'amakko'), or simply Ts'amakko. It is a Cushitic language, spoken in Southwest Ethiopia and belongs to the Dullay cluster of Lowland East Cushitic. The number of speakers is about 10,000. The data…

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.

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

This dissertation focuses on the question how text and paratext contribute to the way that text in a network-like environment is clearly bordered and at the same time can easily be linked to other texts.

Stylianos Irakleous defended his thesis on 6 February 2020

This thesis discusses the development in Proto–Indo–European, Latin and Romance of a word–formation pattern which the most adequate terminology in use dubs ‘verbal government compounds with a governing first member’; I use the shorthand ‘pickpocket compounds’.

Alwin Kloekhorst, working at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, has received a Vidi grant for his research on the break-up of the Indo-European language.

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

Sevil Cakir-Kilincoglu defended her thesis on 18 December 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.

The prestigious American Journal of Comparative Law (2016, pp. 790-4) just published a book review of Sofia Ranchordas monograph ‘Constitutional Sunsets and Experimental Legislation’ (Edward Elgar). The book is partially based on her PhD dissertation for which she was awarded a cum laude doctorate degree…

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.

Subproject of

This research cross-culturally examines the particular ways both the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925 – 1995) and the Japanese Zen Buddhist master Dōgen Kigen (1200 – 1253) considered ontology and one's conception of subjectivity as concretely interwoven with the existential question of life…

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 volume was edited by Jeroen Duindam, Jill Harries, Caroline Humfress, and Nimrod Hurvitz.

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

What are the conditions under which coercive diplomacy can compel a State to abandon its controversial nuclear (weapons) program? Based on the experience of the US coercive diplomacy against the nuclear programs of three countries, namely Iran, Libya and South Africa, Jean Yves Ndzana’s PhD research…

Lecture, Workshop

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.

On 26 June 2016 the Council of the Academia Europaea approved a class lists of scholars to be invited to accept membership at the Academia Europaea. Professor Lisa Cheng was elected for the section “Linguistic Studies”.

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)…

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…

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.

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.

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.