marc.olivier-loiseau@tcd.ie
marc.olivier@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk
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Dr Marc Olivier-Loiseau
I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, funded by the Irish Research Council - Government of Ireland. I am the PI of a project on the syntax of Old Occitan. I have a MSc and a PhD in Linguistics, and in 2023 I was awarded a Seal of Excellence by the European Commission.
I work on syntax and language change. I published work on clitics, auxiliary selection, restructuring, and complementizers.
I am an associate member of the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics in Oxford, an associate researcher of the Maison Française d'Oxford, and an associate member of the CLESTHIA research team at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.
I 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.
I was a Lecturer in Linguistics in the University of Oxford for several years, and the Linguistics Organising Tutor of St John's College and St Catherine's College, and briefly of Pembroke College too. Previously I taught at Queen's University Belfast and Ulster University.
Research interests
Research interests
Formal syntax
Clitics • Auxiliary selection • Agree • Restructuring • Complementizer typology and the CP-field • PF-interface
Comparative syntax
(Micro)parametric variation in the Gallo-Romance continuum • Language contact • Gallo- vs Italo-Romance comparison
Diachronic syntax
Word order change • Grammaticalisation • Dialectal divergence & convergence • Corpus linguistics
Languages analysed
Old French • French • Old Occitan • Catalan • Standard Italian • Old Sardinian • Greek and its dialects • Amazigh languages
Where to meet me
Where to meet me
7 October 2025 - Dublin.
I will give a talk at the Linguistics Research Seminar of Trinity College Dublin. The title is If the clitic climbs, the auxiliary switches (but not vice versa): exploring syntactic triggers in French.
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.
8 to 10 April 2026 - Caen.
I will present my research on Old Occitan infinitives at the Synchronic and diachronic syntax of Occitan conference organised by the linguistics team at Université de Caen Normandie
26 to 29 August 2026 - Osnabrück.
Submit a proposal to the SLE workshop I am organising on "Clitics, clitic placement, and cliticisation". The deadline is November 17th, you only need to send me a 300-word abstract. The full CFP is available here.
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.
Special issue. I edited a special issue of Revue Romane with Anna Paradís, which features interdisciplinary research on Occitan. Our introduction is published (OA) already.
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.
Current projects
Current projects
Old Occitan word order. I am currently undertaking an IRC-funded postdoc to analyse topics in the syntax of Old Occitan, an underexplored Romance variety.
Greek syntax. In collaboration with Christina Sevdali. We are looking at previously unnoticed patterns of clitic doubling in Greek.
Auxiliary switch (syntax/semantics). I am currently addressing reviewers' comments on a formal article that deals with patterns of auxiliary selection in restructuring clauses in earlier French and Italian (sono/ho voluto partire).
Interface issues in French. In certain contexts, French speakers replace the lexical (not the auxiliary!) verb HAVE with BE. I use these data to draw a distinction between grammaticality and acceptability.
Gallo-Romance syntax. In collaboration with Anna Paradis. We are working on a book chapter on transparency effects in French, Occitan, and Catalan varieties.
Se/si. In collaboration with Raffaella Folli. We noticed new issues with impersonal clitics in both Italian and French, and we're also interested in agreement patterns and variation.
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