Prof. Dr. Laura Rupp

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
English Linguistics

External Senior Fellow
Marie S. Curie FCFP Fellow
January – June 2019

Last Update: 31.08.2019

Curriculum Vitae

Laura Rupp is a Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). She was a Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto and the Australian Catholic University. She obtained a PhD from Essex University in formal syntax. Ever since, she has been engaged in collaborative research on grammatical variation with scholars in language variation and change, a.o. Professor Sali Tagliamonte (University of Toronto) and Professor David Britain (Universität Bern). She is the author of three books, including Let’s talk about –s! Linguistic perspectives on a variable English morpheme (co-author David Britain; to appear with Palgrave in 2018). She has published on grammatical variation across the major journals in the field and her research has been funded by agencies in the Netherlands and the UK. Her most recent research program (with Professor Sali Tagliamonte and Professor Karen Corrigan at Newcastle University) focuses on the nature of non-standard determiners, applying a multidisciplinary research method to corpora of spoken vernacular dialects to explore their emergence, historical development and contemporary socio-grammatical function. She supervises BA-projects and MA- and PhD-dissertations on grammatical variation and English as a Lingua Franca. Next to her scholarly work and teaching on language variation, she has been designing a MOOC on English Pronunciation in a global world. She has also been the director of a national project that has designed a series of linguistics and literature lessons to raise language awareness among pupils at secondary schools. At VU she is currently a member of a steering group that oversees the implementation of a Community Engagement module in the curriculum of all VU-students.

Selected Publications

Rupp, Laura and David Britain. (2018). Let’s talk about –s! Linguistic perspectives on a variable English morpheme. To appear with: Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Rupp, Laura and Sali A. Tagliamonte. (2017). ‘This here town: evidence for the development of the English determiner system from a vernacular demonstrative construction in York English’. English Language and Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674317000326.
Doel, Rias van den and Laura Rupp (eds). (2014). Pronunciation matters. Accents of English in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Amsterdam: VU University Press.
Rupp, Laura. (2013). ‘The function of Student Pidgin.’ English Today 29: 13–22.
Rupp, Laura. (2008). ‘The (socio)linguistic cycle of Definite Article Reduction.’ Folia Linguistica Historica 28: 251–249.

FRIAS Project

The socio-grammatical function of vernacular determiners then and now: evidence for linguistic theories.

The project is a comparative and multidisciplinary programme on vernacular determiners. These include: a zero determiner (They followed Ø river), a reduced determiner (t’ baby arrived), complex demonstratives (What is that there book?) and non-standard uses of determiners (the Scarborough Road). Initially focussing on English and Dutch, the project asks: Why and how do vernacular determiners emerge and persist? The project investigates (1) the range of vernacular determiners; (2) their history and geographical distribution; (3) their socio-grammatical function (present and past); (4) their acquisition; and (5) their relevance to linguistic theories. The multidisciplinary framework consists of the subfields language variation and change (social catalysts), linguistic contact and second language contexts (acquisition), historical linguistics (grammaticalization), discourse-pragmatics (information structure), and generative syntax (the structure of nominal expressions). The project consists of three subprojects. Part of subproject 1, which probes vernacular determiners in English varieties world-wide, will be conducted at FRIAS, investigating data from the FRED-corpus. Subproject 2 examines vernacular determiners in English contact varieties (e.g. Irish-English). Subproject 3 studies vernacular determiners in Dutch (e.g. Noord-Gronings); at FRIAS I would like to examine the possibility of extending the project to German. The project explores the hypothesis that vernacular determiners may not disappear but acquire new uses. The project is conducted within an international network of researchers. It will result in a volume of papers that jointly advances our understanding of the nature of vernacular determiners.