Dr Marc Olivier-Loiseau
Academic linguist
I am a Lecturer in Linguistics based at the University of Oxford, UK. I am the Linguisitics Organising Tutor of St John's College, St Catherine's College, and Pembroke College, and an Associate Researcher of the Maison Française d'Oxford.
My research lies at the intersection of formal syntax and historical linguistics, with a focus on Old French and Old Occitan. I am particularly interested in clitics, clause size, infinitives, and auxiliary selection.
Prior to my current post, I held research and teaching positions at Queen's University Belfast and Ulster University. I have a PhD in Linguistics, with specialisation in historical syntax. In 2023, I was awarded a Seal of Excellence by the European Commission in recognition of the quality of my research. I currently sit on the Executive Committee of Societas Linguistica Europaea, the largest linguistics society in Europe.
Where to meet me:
If you're based in Oxford, I convene a weekly Occitan reading group. All welcome!
I will present a formal analysis of auxiliary switch at the upcoming edition of Going Romance in Braga, Portugal.
I will be in Cambridge in January, where I'll present solo-work on auxiliaries and joint work on language contact.
I am organising DiGS26 in Oxford. The conference will feature a workshop entitled Investigating diachronic syntax with less-documented and unwritten languages: methods and theory. You can submit an abstract here until January 27, 2025.
News:
I have a new paper coming up in Probus. 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. It's in press for now, but feel free to ask for a preprint.
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.
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!