Thomas Rainsford

I am a lecturer (Akademischer Oberrat) at the Institut für Linguistik/Romanistik at the University of Stuttgart.  My field of research is historical Romance linguistics with a focus on the history of  French, Occitan, and Italian. I have worked extensively on prosodic change in the history of French, and my monograph on the subject was published by Garnier in July 2026. I was until recently one of eight PIs in the DFG-funded Research Unit Structuring the Input in Language Processing, Acquisition and Change (SILPAC)  (FOR 5157, 2022-2026), and my project examined links between lexical change and morpho-syntactic change in the expression of motion events in French and Italian. I work frequently with historical corpora, and have developed the Old Gallo-Romance Corpus (OGR) and the Corpus Métrique de l'Ancien Français (CorMétAF) which build on my research into prosodic and phonological change in French and Occitan by incorporating layers of phonological and metrical annotation. I studied for my PhD at the University of Cambridge and have subsequently worked at the ENS de Lyon (France) and as a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford.

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