Theoretical & Historical Linguist

Marc Olivier-Loiseau

Postdoctoral Research Fellow · Department of Linguistics
Trinity College Dublin · Dublin, Ireland

Marc Olivier-Loiseau

About

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, funded by Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland. My work investigates the structural foundations of language variation, with particular attention to the interplay between diachrony, microvariation, and grammatical architecture. Two core questions drive my research agenda: why word order changes over time, and why closely related languages develop distinct properties. My primary area of expertise is in formal Romance syntax, and I have worked on a range of varieties including Old and Modern French, Old Occitan, Old and Modern Italian, Old Sardinian, Old and Modern Catalan, and Romanian, as well as Standard Greek and the Amazigh languages.

I am an Associate Member of the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford, and an Associate Researcher of the Maison Française d'Oxford. I sit on the Executive Committee of the Societas Linguistica Europaea.

Before joining TCD, I was a Lecturer in French Linguistics at the University of Oxford, where I served as Linguistics Organising Tutor at St John's College, St Catherine's College, and Pembroke College. I previously taught at Queen's University Belfast and Ulster University.

Email

marc.olivier-loiseau@tcd.ie
marc.olivier@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk

Profiles

Google Scholar · ORCID · ResearchGate

Office

Room 3129
Department of Linguistics
Arts Building
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland

Research

My research investigates the formal properties of natural language, drawing on corpus linguistics, diachronic data, and cross-linguistic comparison. Past and current projects include:

Clitics

My work on clitic placement investigates the proclisis-enclisis alternation in finite and non-finite clauses (in the history of French and in other Romance languages), and patterns of clitic climbing, reduplication, and interpolation. I am also interested in the nature of clitic doubling (mainly in Greek) and its consequences on theories of clitic placement.

Auxiliaries

My Probus article offers a minimalist analysis of auxiliary selection in French, where I argue against the traditional hypothesis that argument structure 'decides'. In my NLLT paper, I apply my framework to auxiliary switch, with new data from the diachrony of French and in comparison with Italian.

Complementizers

I observed that some infinitival complementizers (a/de) are merged low. In work co-authored with Anna Paradís, we draw on pan-Romance data to argue that 'prepositional complementizers' can be either true P or true C. When they are the latter, we show that they can be merged in the following domains: CP, IP, or vP.

Restructuring

While my work argues against the existence of 'restructuring', it looks at clause size and long distance phenomena. My research focuses on clitic climbing, auxiliary switch, infinitival complementizers, and the 'know how to' construction. I also include cases of infinitive fronting of the type found in medieval Romance.

Agree

I defend the view that formal features can be specified with subfeatures (or rather, subvalues). My formal work on auxiliary selection proposes that Agree tracks indices of person features and questions the notion of argument identity.

Passives & Impersonals

This collaboration with Raffaella Folli questions the nature of se-constructions in French, in comparison with Italian. We aim at contributing to the issue of differentiating passives from impersonals.

Old French & Old Occitan

My work on these languages is quantitative and involves corpus linguistics. I document and quantify morphosyntactic constructions to analyse patterns of change and variation, within and between the two languages.

Comparative Romance syntax

Much of my work documents and analyses the Romance language, with the systematic inclusion of minoritised varieties. I am fascinated by the mechanisms behind the fragmentation of Latin into a multitude of languages.

Greek

In my book I compare clitic placement across Greek varieties (Standard, Pontic, Cypriot, Italiot, and Tsakonian). My collaboration with Christina Sevdali explores patterns of clitic doubling across clausal domains in Standard Greek.

Publications

Book

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Book Chapters

Edited Special Issues

Book Review

Theses

Blog Post

Talks & Presentations

Invited Talks

Peer-Reviewed Oral Presentations

Presentations at Workshops & Seminars

Poster Presentations

Service

Outreach

Teaching

University of Oxford

Undergraduate — Year 1

  • Prelims — General Linguistics
  • Prelims — Semantics & Pragmatics

Undergraduate — Years 2, 3, 4

  • Paper A/XIII — General Linguistics
  • Paper IV — French Historical Linguistics
  • Paper V — Modern French Linguistics
  • Paper B2 — Syntax
  • Paper B6 — Historical Linguistics

Postgraduate

  • MPhil Thesis — Research supervision
  • Paper Bii — Syntax
  • Paper Di — History of French
  • Paper Dii — Structure of French

Miscellaneous

  • Reading Group — Occitan
  • Oxford Prospects Programme — Critical Thinking
  • Oxford Prospects Programme — Presentation Skills

Ulster University

Undergraduate

  • CMM538 — Dissertation, research supervision
  • CMM350 — Advanced Syntax
  • CMM349 — Formal Semantics
  • CMM384 — Steps into Sociolinguistics
  • CMM151 — Introduction to Morphology and Syntax
  • FRE507 — French Language & Society
  • FRE505 — Dissertation, research supervision
  • LAN510 — Advanced Translation for English Native Speakers
  • LAN510 — Interpreting
  • ESL302 — Translation for French Native Speakers

Postgraduate

  • CMM531 — Formal Semantics
  • Doctoral College — Introduction to LaTeX

Queen's University Belfast

Undergraduate

  • FRH3101 — Essay Writing
  • FRH3101 — Translation
  • FRH3050 — French Grammar
  • FRH3050 — Oral French
  • FRH3050 — Professional French

Lycée Grandmont

Baccalauréat Level

  • English Language
  • English Literature
  • Technological Sciences in English

Events

Snapshots from events I have organised over the years.