Dr Marc Olivier
Research
Dr Marc Olivier is a linguist working primarily at the intersection of formal syntax and language change. His research focuses on medieval Romance languages, Old French and Old Occitan in particular. His publications on clitic placement and the structure of infinitival clauses and restructuring are recognised as an important contribution to the field, and his work has been presented at various international conferences held in the UK, in the EU and in the US. He holds a MSc in Linguistics and a PhD in Historical Syntax: his thesis A Corpus Study of Clitic Placement with Infinitives in the Diachrony of French provides an investigation of the evolution of word order over 700 years of French legal data. Prior to working at the University of Oxford, Dr Olivier held teaching and research positions at Queen’s University Belfast and Ulster University.
Teaching
Dr Olivier currently teaches a mix of tutorials, classes and lectures on the following:
Prelims — General Linguistics
Prelims — Semantics and Pragmatics
Paper IV — History of French
Paper V — Modern French Linguistics
Paper XIII/A — General Linguistics
Publications
submitted. Olivier, Marc. “Strong morphology, weak distribution: pronouns in medieval French”.
submitted. Olivier, Marc, Raffaella Folli and Christina Sevdali. “Infinitive fronting as a transparency effect in Old and Middle French”.
submitted. Olivier, Marc. “Microparametric change in French: clitic placement in infinitival clauses”.
submitted. Olivier, Marc, Raffaella Folli and Christina Sevdali. ”Clitic climbing and restructuring in the history of French”.
2022. Olivier, Marc. “Diachronie de la proclise et de l’enclise avec l’infinitif en français médiéval (12e-15e s.)”. Studia Linguistica Romanica. DOI: 10.25364 /19.2022.8.2
2022. Olivier, Marc. “A Corpus Study of Clitic Placement with Infinitives in the Diachrony of French”. PhD Thesis. LingBuzz: 006685
2021. Olivier, Marc. ”Language in time: assessing Medieval French registers in a quest for accuracy in historical linguistics”. French Studies Bulletin. DOI: 10.1093/frebul/ktab012
