Research
Dr Marc Olivier-Loiseau is a linguist working at the intersection of theoretical syntax, comparative syntax, and historical syntax. His research focuses on word order issues in the Romance languages, having worked on French, Occitan, Italian, Catalan, and also some work on Sardinian and Romanian. For most of these languages, he also collected data from their medieval stage. Beyond Romance, he also works on Greek (the standard variety, and also some work on its dialects) and the Amazigh languages (spoken in North Africa). In particular, Dr Olivier-Loiseau investigates issues relating to clitic placement, auxiliary selection, word order, infinitives, and clause size (i.e., restructuring). He recently completed a monograph entitled Clitic Placement in the History of French to be published with Oxford University Press in the Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics series.
After many years lecturing and tutoring in Oxford, where he also organised the international Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS26) conference and several editions of the Occitan Studies Day, Dr Olivier-Loiseau moved to the Department of Linguistics at Trinity College Dublin, where he currently holds a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship funded by Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland (competitive grant). There, he leads a project on the syntax of Old Occitan and launched a new conference series called Gallo-Romance Advances in Morphology & Syntax (GRAMS).
In 2023, Dr Olivier-Loiseau was awarded a Seal of Excellence by the European Commission in recognition of the quality of his research. He was chercheur associé of the Maison Française d'Oxford for several years, and he is currently a member of the CLESTHIA research team at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.
Dr Olivier-Loiseau holds a MSc in Formal Linguistics and a PhD in Historical Syntax. Prior to working at the University of Oxford, he held teaching and research positions at Queen's University Belfast and Ulster University. Committed to fostering a nurturing and inclusive environment for linguists, Dr Olivier-Loiseau sat on the Executive Board of Societas Linguistica Europaea from 2023 to 2026, which is the largest linguistics society in Europe. Previously, he sat on the Executive Committee of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain.
Publications
in preparation. Olivier, Marc & Pujol i Campeny, Afra. [editor of special issue] Romance languages and historical syntax: emerging perspectives. Special issue of Studia Linguistica.
in preparation. Pujol i Campeny, Afra & Olivier, Marc. [editor of special issue] Crosslinguistic perspectives on syntactic change in the diachrony of Romance. Special issue of Catalan Journal of Linguistics.
submitted. Olivier, Marc and Raffaella Folli. Implicit agents in Italian and in French: passives and impersonals side by side.
forthcoming. Olivier, Marc. Clitic Placement in the History of French. Book under contract with Oxford University Press (series: Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics).
submitted. Paradís, Anna and Marc Olivier. When clausal boundaries disappear: Gallo-Romance meets Ibero-Romance. Adam Ledgeway and Norma Schifano (eds.) Syntactic variation and change under contact: case studies from the Romance languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
submitted. Olivier, Marc and Anna Paradís. Clitic placement along the French, Occitan, and Catalan medieval continuum. Mar Garachana & Andreu Sentí (eds.) Ibero- and Gallo-Romance through time. De Gruyter.
accepted. Olivier, Marc and Anna Paradís. A tripartition of complementizers: exploring clause size in Romance. Adina Dragomirescu and Alexandru Nicolae (eds.) Theoretical and Empirical issues in the study of clause size. Special issue of Revue Roumaine de Linguistique.
2026. Olivier, Marc. Agree in restructuring: evidence from auxiliary switch and clitic climbing in French and Italian. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. DOI: 10.1007/s11049-026-09709-4
2026. Olivier, Marc & Pujol i Campeny, Afra. [editor of special issue] Proceedings of DiGS26. Special collection of Journal of Historical Syntax
2025. Olivier, Marc. A syntactic account of auxiliary selection in French. Probus. DOI: 10.1515/probus-2024-0005
2025. Olivier, Marc. [invited book review] Mathieu Goux / Pascale Mounier (ed.), La corrélation en diachronie longue (1450-1800), Paris, Honoré Champion, 2023, 354 pages. In Revue de Linguistique Romane. DOI: 10.46277/rlir.2025.262-266
2025. Olivier, Marc. Clitic placement with infinitives in the diachrony of French: from enclisis to proclisis. Journal of Historical Syntax 9. DOI: 10.18148/hs/2025.v9i2-10.212
2025. Olivier, Marc & Paradís, Anna. [editor of special issue] Researching Occitan in the 21st Century: un dialòg interdisciplinari. Special issue of Revue Romane, 60(1). DOI: 10.1075/rro.00040.oli
2024. Olivier, Marc, Sevdali, Christina, & Raffaella Folli. Infinitive fronting as a transparency effect in Old and Middle French. In New perspectives on the syntax of causative and restructuring verbs in Romance, eds. Jan Casalicchio & Peter Herbeck. Isogloss: Open Journal of Romance Linguistics. DOI: 10.5565/rev/isogloss.314
2023. Olivier, Marc, Sevdali, Christina, & Raffaella Folli. Clitic climbing and restructuring in the history of French. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 8(1). pp. 1–45. DOI: 10.16995/glossa.10135
2022. Olivier, Marc. Diachronie de la proclise et de l'enclise avec l'infinitif en français médiéval (12e-15e s.). In Le temps long: l'évoution du français dans un corpus textuel calibé. Le témoignage de la coutume de Normandie, ed. Mathieu Goux. Studia Linguistica Romanica 8, pp. 10-35. DOI: 10.25364 /19.2022.8.2
2021. Olivier, Marc. Language in time: assessing Medieval French registers in a quest for accuracy in historical linguistics. French Studies Bulletin 42(159), pp.23-27. DOI: 10.1093/frebul/ktab012