I am a linguist and a syntactician.

I defended my PhD thesis "The features of Binding and Person Licensing" in August 2020 at the University of Göttingen (Germany). [pdf]

I am currently teaching General Linguistics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

My thesis focuses on the featural composition and syntactic licensing of pronominal expressions, and, in particular, of anaphors and 1st and 2nd person pronouns.

The study of the syntactic constraints of pronominal items has largely been undertaken along two separate axes, one being the divide between anaphors and pronouns, subsumed under Binding Theory, and the other being the divide between 1st and 2nd person pronouns and 3rd person pronouns in person-based restrictions, e.g. PCC effects. My thesis unifies the study of these constraints, and argues that there are reasons to conceive of anaphors and 1st and 2nd person pronouns as a natural class, underlied by a similar featural make-up. In particular, I look at those environments in which reflexives and 1st and 2nd person pronouns pattern alike, and attempt to unravel what these may tell us about the features of anaphors, on the one hand, and about the features of 1st and 2nd person pronouns, on the other.

Research interests


  • Ethical datives and applicatives cross-linguistically

  • Person effects: PCC-effects, person-based ergativity and direct-inverse systems

  • Phi-features and referential index features

  • Markers of anaphoricity: switch reference, verbal reflexive markers ("anaphoric agreement") and 4th person agreement

  • The Anaphor-Agreement Effect

Contact:

louise.raynaud [at] ulb.be