Welcome to our new visiting scholar Laura Rupp (from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Our department welcomes Laura Rupp, who will be with us as a visiting scholar and working with Sali Tagliamonte. She's coming to us from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She has a page on her university's site here.

Laura Rupp is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She did her Ph.D. thesis on grammatical theory at the University of Essex (UK) and soon developed an interest in grammatical properties of English varieties. Her current research is on grammatical constraints on variation. One the hand, she explores how insights from grammatical theory may help advance our understanding of grammatical conditioning of variation. On the other hand, she explores the window that grammatical properties of English varieties offer on the nature of grammatical rules. In the past few years, she has developed fruitful collaboration with researchers in the field of Language Variation and Change. This collaboration had led to a joint paper with Sali Tagliamonte on the historical development and current function of so-called complex demonstratives (e.g. this here park) in York English that will be published in English Language and Linguistics in 2017. During my visit to UoT from Jan 21-March 3, we will conduct further research and write a paper on two other vernacular demonstratives in York English: the zero article (e.g. Ø park) and the reduced demonstrative (e.g. t’ park). In other joint research with David Britain (University of Bern, Switzerland), she has been inquiring into the nature of the ‘Northern Subject Rule’ in varieties of English and the implications for linguistic theorizing on subject-verb agreement. According to the Northern Subject Rule, morphology on the verb is regulated by subject type (NP versus pronoun; e.g. The children gets away with it vs They get_ away with it), rather than the person/number properties of the subject.