About

My name is Marc Olivier-Loiseau, but professionally I go by Marc Olivier. This choice is primarily due to the fact that none of the letters in oiseau (meaning "bird" in French) are pronounced as one would expect (oi is [wa], s is [z], and eau is [o]), and using just Olivier saves time. 

I grew up in the Loire Valley, France. I graduated with a BA in English studies, and I then completed a MSc in Linguistics and a PhD in Historical Syntax. I have always been interested in languages and Language (I asked for an etymology dictionary and a dictionary of synonyms for Christmas when I was 10, which did not really make sense at the time but it does now). Early on, I was exposed to English (at school) and German (first with my mother, then at school), and in the early 2000s French radios were playing a lot of Italian songs, so I picked some of that up too. Later on I studied Modern Greek by accident. Since I'm in Oxford, I attend Romanian classes. For reasons I can't quite explain myself, I know Occitan, which led me to convene an Occitan reading group in Oxford. I studied English at uni because I wanted to become an English teacher, which I sort of was for a while, until I backtracked because I realised it was not my calling. After this, I went to China where I had an epiphany (which, if you know me, is also known as 'the shower episode') that my true destiny was to become a linguist. I flew back to France, and then me and my cats moved to the UK (pre-Brexit times were brilliant).

Linguistics, and language, is what prevents me from falling asleep in the evening, but also what gets me out of bed in the morning. I am fascinated by the fact that we speak/sign, and I seek to understand how this is stored, organised, and processed in the human brain. I am also astonished by the variety of complex and creative structures that exists within and across languages.

My research specialisation is in syntax, specifically the study of word order. This research lies at the intersection of historical syntax (why word order changes over time) and comparative syntax (why languages have different word orders).

The phenomena that interest me mainly include clitic placement, restructuring clauses, complementizers, and auxiliary selection. I usually work with corpora, and recent innovations in the Digital Humanities provide my research with a computationally-engaged methodology that enables me to analyse dead/old languages from a different perspective.

The languages I research are from the Romance family, with specific attention, to French and its history. Namely, I research how generation after generation, Latin morphed into French, without there being a neat fracture at any point in time. Naturally, this has led my to consider other Romance languages too, to better understand how Latin fragmented into many languages. As such, I work(ed) on Occitan varieties (including Old Occitan), which leads me to also look at Catalan. Recently, my research interests have also made me analyse data from Italian, Sardinian, and Romanian.

I have experience in teaching a wide range of topics, from theoretical linguistics (generative syntax, formal semantics, phonetics & phonology) to applied linguistics (sociolinguistics) and historical linguistics. I also taught practical language classes (translation, interpreting, grammar, essay writing in a foreign language), and more general academic skills (critical thinking, presentation skills).

I have two cats, Hercules & Isidorine.