marc.olivier-loiseau@tcd.ie.
marc.olivier@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk
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Dr Marc Olivier-Loiseau
I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, funded by the Irish Research Council - Government of Ireland. I am based in the Centre for Language & Communication Studies, and I am the PI of a project on the syntax of Old Occitan.
I am a generative syntactician specialising in the Minimalist framework. This positions my research at the intersection of linguistics and cognition, with a natural connection to language acquisition.
On top of the research I undertake in my institution, I am an associate researcher of the Maison Française d'Oxford, an associate member of the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics in Oxford, and an associate member of the CLESTHIA research team at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.
I currently sit on the Executive Committee of Societas Linguistica Europaea, the largest linguistics society in Europe. From 2019 to 2022, I sat on the Executive Committee of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain as doctoral representative.
Prior to being a Research Fellow at TCD, I was a Lecturer in Linguistics in the University of Oxford for several years, where I was the Linguistics Organising Tutor of St John's College and St Catherine's College, and briefly of Pembroke too. I also held research and teaching positions at Queen's University Belfast and Ulster University. I have a MSc and a PhD in Linguistics, and in 2023 I was awarded a Seal of Excellence by the European Commission in recognition of the quality of my research.
Research interests
Research interests
Theoretical syntax
Clitic placement • Auxiliary selection and binding • The vP field • Agree • Restructuring and transparency effects • Complementizer typology and the CP field
Comparative syntax
(Micro)parametric variation in the Gallo-Romance continuum • Language contact • Gallo- vs Italo-Romance comparison
Diachronic syntax
Grammaticalisation and reanalysis • Syntax-Morphophonology mapping • Evolution of clitic placement and cliticisation at the PF interface • Change in verb placement • Dialectal divergence • Corpus linguistics
Romance syntax
Medieval Romance • French • Occitan • Catalan • Italian • Sardinian • Minoritised varieties
Where to meet me
Where to meet me
7 October 2025 - Dublin.
I will give a talk at the Linguistics Research Seminar of Trinity College Dublin.
11 to 12 December 2025 - Paris.
I will give two talks at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle on research I undertake on the syntax of Sardinian, Italian, Occitan, and French.
8 to 10 April 2026 - Caen.
I will present my research on Old Occitan infinitives at the Synchronic and diachronic syntax of Occitan conference organised by the linguistics team at Université de Caen Normandie
News
News
Article. I have a new paper published in Probus (Open Access). It's a syntactic (minimalist) analysis of auxiliary selection in French, in which I argue against the traditional hypothesis that argument structure plays a part.
Article. My paper on clitic placement and infinitive placement in Old French was published in the Journal of Historical Syntax (Open Access). I demonstrate that French initially displayed the patterns found in Italian, Spanish, and Catalan (enclisis and high infinitives) before changes in the sound system led to further changes in the grammar.
Article. I recently co-authored an article with Anna Paradís on the nature of infinitival complementizers in a variety of Romance languages (we analyse data from Catalan, Spanish, Romanian, Old French, and Old Italian). It's currently under review.
Article. Following the talks I gave at SLE57, ICL2024, and the Cambridge Romance Linguistics seminar, I recently submitted an article on auxiliary switch in earlier French, Italian and Sardinian, which builds on the theoretical framework developed in my Probus article. I'm happy to share the submitted version if you're interested.
Special issue. I am editing a special issue of the Catalan Journal of Linguistics with Afra Pujol i Campeny, titled Crosslinguistic perspectives on syntactic change in the diachrony of Romance. The call for papers is available here, if you want to submit an article.
Special issue. I am editing a special issue of Revue Romane with Anna Paradís, which will feature interdisciplinary research on Occitan. The issue is planned for publication for Autumn 2025 and will include contributions in several languages, watch this space!
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