Dr Marc Olivier is a lecturer in French Linguistics at the University of Oxford. He is specialising in the intersection of formal syntax and language change. His research primarily addresses word order issues in medieval Romance languages, particularly Old French and Old Occitan, as well as morphosyntax in modern Romance languages. His published work focuses on issues relating to clitics, clitic placement, clause size (restructuring), infinitival clauses, and auxiliary selection. He is currently working on a monograph titled Clitic Placement in the History of French, to be published by Oxford University Press in the Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics series.
In 2023, Dr Olivier was awarded a Seal of Excellence by the European Commission in recognition of his high-quality research. He serves as the Principal Investigator of a project bringing together psycholinguistics and experimental syntax, The Effects of Syntactic Operations on Cognition, supported by a John Fell Fund grant, employing two Research Assistants. In addition, he is the primary organiser of the annual Occitan Studies Day, a multilingual, interdisciplinary, and international meeting for occitanists.
Dr Olivier holds an MSc in Formal Linguistics and a PhD in Historical Syntax. Before joining 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 currently sits on the Executive Board of Societas Linguistica Europaea, the largest linguistics society in Europe. Previously, he served on the Executive Committee of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain.
Personal website and complete CV: https://www.m-olivierloiseau.com