Research

Current research areas

My current research focuses on two core areas:

  • change in expression of motion events in the history of French and Italian;

  • prosodic change in the history of French, also the subject of my 2011 doctoral dissertation.

For detailed information on my current and previous research, please see the list of my publications.

Current projects and collaborations

I'm currently (2022-6) Principal Investigator on the DFG-funded project Lexical change in motion: Motion verbs and motion lexicalization from medieval to modern Romance which is part of the Research Unit Structuring the Input in Language Processing, Acquisition and Change (SILPAC) (FOR 5157), speaker Carola Trips (U. Mannheim).

Additionally, I'm a collaborator on the ANR-funded SALTA project (2021-5), which studies asymmetries in spatial expressions from a typological perspective (PIs: Benjamin Fagard, Anetta Kopecka (DDL), Christine Lamarre (INALCO CRLAO), Alice Vittrant (DDL)).

Finally, to indulge my passion for corpora, text editing, and historical phonology, I'm in the process of creating an Old Gallo-Romance Corpus (OGR), containing richly annotated versions of all French and Occitan texts copied before c1130. Check out the website at http://www.ogr-corpus.org!

Previous projects

I worked as a post-doc on the ANR/DFG funded Syntactic Reference Corpus of Medieval French (SRCMF) (www.srcmf.org) project (2009-12) building an annotated treebank of Old French. The team in Lyon with which I worked also created the superb Base de Français médiéval (BFM) corpus (http://txm.bfm-corpus.org/) and develop the TXM corpus analysis platform (http://textometrie.ens-lyon.fr/). I've also collaborated on the the ANR/DFG PaLaFra project, examining the development of French morphosyntax during the transition from Late Latin to Romance, and the ANR project PROFITEROLE (2017-20) which applies state-of-the-art NLP techniques to parsing Old French.

In collaboration with Christiane Marchello-Nizia and with the kind assistance of the BFM team, we produced a new digital edition of the Old French Life of saint Alexis (http://catalog.bfm-corpus.org/AlexisRaM), which was included in the BFM from 2018.

Finally, with travel funding as part of my British Academy post-doc (2012-2014), I was able work with Olga Scrivner at Indiana University to create a metrically and syntactically annotated version of the Old Occitan Boecis text (see Scrivner and Rainsford 2014).

Miscellaneous

I set up the website for the Société Internationale de Diachronie du français (SIDF) and managed it for nine years between 2009 and 2018 (www.diachronie.org).

I've also developed a few tools for miscellaneous tasks relating to corpus management and analysis which I've made available on Sourceforge. More details here.