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I am a specialist of Occitan, which is the language spoken by a part of my family as well as myself. It is spoken in the southern half of France, as well as small territories in Italy and Spain. I have been teaching the language for twenty years now. There are many projects going on about the Occitan language: I aim to describe some of its varieties, particularly those of Venés (81) and Cabrières (34); I plan on a relatively large corpus study of Lengadocian morphosyntax based on collections of tales; I work with colleagues at Oxford on the Occitano-Catalan hypothesis within Romance; I study the (long) diachrony of the language and the first writings in Occitan in the Middle Ages; and finally I aim at publishing a number of ancient texts to make them available to scholars.
Describing Occitan varieties
Describing Occitan varieties
Two ongoing projects aim at providing a description of specific Occitan varieties:
Description of the morphosyntax and phonology of the variety of Venés (Tarn), which is my own variety
Description of the variety spoken around the village of Cabrières (Hérault), together with Pierre-Joan Bernard: this is a near-extinct variety for which a number of documents have been preserved, including tape recordings and fieldnotes from linguists and ethnographers during the second half of the twentieth century, as well as our own recordings with the very last speakers of the area. We aim at providing a linguistic description of the variety, in addition to a collection of texts from the 19th and 20th century that we have been able to gather
Lengadocian Occitan Morphosyntax
Lengadocian Occitan Morphosyntax
This project is a long-term description of Lengadocian syntax, based on a corpus of tales collected in the 20th century orally and published in a transcription form. I am starting the work with the description of complex predicates, as well as the syntax of adjectives in Lengadocian Occitan. The aim is to produce a monograph in English, and then to adapt the findings into a pedagogical volume on Lengadocian syntax, either in French or in Occitan.
The Catalan-Occitan hypothesis: evidence from morphosyntax
The Catalan-Occitan hypothesis: evidence from morphosyntax
This is a project in collaboration with Víctor Acedo-Matellán, Afra Pujol i Campeny and Anna Paradis, all at the University of Oxford. In 2020, 2021 and 2023, we organised a series of lectures at the university of Oxford on the subgrouping of the Romance languages, focusing in particular on the placement of Occitan and Catalan.
We are not taking this work further with the aim of producing a full volume of studies. We take the hypothesis, proposed on phonological and mostly lexical grounds, that Occitan and Catalan form a separate subgroup of the Romance languages, distinct from the traditionnally recognised Gallo-Romance and Ibero-Romance, and we adduce evidence taken from morphosyntax, which was not previously taken into account when proposing this hypothesis.
The long diachrony of Occitan
The long diachrony of Occitan
I have started a series of studies examining the syntactic developments affecting Lengadocian Occitan throughout its long documented history (11th-21st century). This is made by choosing a number of syntactic structures (negation, periphrastic tenses, auxiliaries, hypothetical clauses, etc), and examining attested examples in a carefully chosen corpus of texts, trying to find, for the same area, texts every half a century. The first study on negation has given good results, showing in particular the role of language contact with French in shaping some of the observed changes.
The grammaticalisation of tornar (verb, auxiliary, and adverb)
The grammaticalisation of tornar (verb, auxiliary, and adverb)
From past to future: anar + infinitive in Occitan
From past to future: anar + infinitive in Occitan
The periphrasis anar + infinitive is something of a puzzle in the history of the Occitan language, as in medieval times it expresses a past tense (as in Catalan, which probably acquired it through contact with Occitan), but in modern varieties, it expresses the future, as in French.
Multilingualism and linguistic change in Montpellier (14th-16th century)
Multilingualism and linguistic change in Montpellier (14th-16th century)
The project Multilingualism and linguistic change in Montpellier (14th-16th century), that I lead in 2021-23, funded by by the John Fell Fund at the University of Oxford, included the analysis of language use in a wide array of documents mostly preserved in the Archives municipales de Montpellier. This included account books, receipt books, letters received by the consulate, pièces extraites, as well as various documents having to do with commerce in the Levant.
The project was in collaboration with Dr Lucie Galano (Montpellier) and Pierre-Joan Bernard (Archives de Montpellier).
When studying the history of a language, the question of source texts is crucial. This is why I work with colleagues on editing and publishing a wide range of ancient texts preserved for the language, from medieval letters and charters to early modern poetry, songs and plays. More on this by following this link to text edition projects.
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