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Academic linguist
marc.olivier@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk
I am a Lecturer in Linguistics based at the University of Oxford, UK. I am the Linguistics Organising Tutor of St John's College and St Catherine's College.
My research interests are in theoretical syntax, comparative Romance syntax, and historical syntax. I have published work on clitic placement, auxiliary selection, restructuring clauses, clause size, and the syntactic operation Agree. I mostly work on Gallo-Romance (which includes French, Occitan, and their dialects) and Italian.
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. I'm not necessarily evangelical about this approach, as I believe different frameworks offer different, valuable perspectives.
On top of the research I undertake in my institution, I am an Associate Researcher of the Maison Française d'Oxford and a 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 my current post, I 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.
Where to meet me
Where to meet me
26 to 29 August 2025 - Bordeaux.
I am co-organising a workshop at the 58th edition of Societas Linguistica Europaea. It is entitled Diachronic Studies on Minoritised and Under-researched Romance Varieties. The abstract submission platform is now closed.
I am also co-organising the Outreach session of the SLE with Alexandru Nicolae (University of Bucharest).
I will also present recent research on the grammaticalisation of Wh-elements as polarity items.
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.
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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