I work on the sound structure of language, and on what the smallest differences between varieties reveal about the system underneath. A dialect that says hoes where the standard says huis is not making a mistake; it is showing which parts of a grammar can move and which cannot. That question — what varies, and what therefore must be there — runs through everything below.
Four current lines
Phonology
The internal structure of speech sounds: which features they are made of, how those features are shared, and how they are organised into syllables and prosodic words. My work in this area runs from Phonological Projection (2000) through Optimality Theory to the representational questions collected in Primitives of Phonological Structure (2023). An open textbook on phonology is in progress.
Language variation
Dutch and its dialects as a laboratory: tone in the Franconian dialects, the life cycle of liquids, intonation across varieties of Dutch, and the large-scale mapping of morphological and phonological variation. Much of this was done at the Meertens Institute, where I worked from 1999 to 2025, and it continues in the Atlas van het dialect in Nederland (2026).
Language, education and policy
What academic language proficiency actually consists of, how second-language writing is assessed in English-medium programmes, and what linguistics could contribute to the school subject Dutch. This is also where my research and my committee work meet: I sit on the national subject expertise team that connects university research on language and literature to the secondary-school curriculum.
Poetic language and language models
Metre is the one place where linguistic structure is deliberately made audible, which makes verse an unusually precise instrument for studying phonology; that was the subject of the project The Birth of the Iamb. More recently I have turned to large language models — not as tools but as objects of study. With Roberta D’Alessandro I have argued that their training is better understood as a process of evolution than as one of learning.
Some key publications
- Phonological Projection. A Theory of Feature Content and Prosodic Structure (Mouton de Gruyter, 2000).
- The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, five volumes, with Colin Ewen, Elizabeth Hume and Keren Rice (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
- Morphological Atlas of the Dutch Dialects, volume II, with Ton Goeman and others (Amsterdam University Press, 2009).
- ‘Optimality Theory’, in The Oxford History of Phonology (Oxford University Press, 2022), 551–568.
- Primitives of Phonological Structure, with Florian Breit, Bert Botma and Marijn van ’t Veer (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Recent articles are listed on the Articles page and books on the Books page. The complete list is in my ORCID record and the Radboud University research portal.
Where the work happens
I am based at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University. Over the years I have secured more than two million euros in research funding, chiefly from NWO and the KNAW, for projects including Maps and Grammar, Tone and Intrasegmental Structure in West-Germanic Dialects and The Life Cycle of Liquids. I have supervised more than thirty doctoral candidates; what supervision involves is described on the Teaching page.
I am one of the editors of the Journal of Linguistics and serve on the editorial boards of Phonology, Glossa, the Journal of Germanic Linguistics and several other journals; the full list is under Editorial Work.