{"id":67,"date":"2026-01-26T20:51:55","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T20:51:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vanoostendorp.nl\/wordpress\/?page_id=67"},"modified":"2026-08-03T15:18:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T15:18:10","slug":"research","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/vanoostendorp.nl\/wordpress\/index.php\/research\/","title":{"rendered":"Research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/em> where the standard says huis<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four current lines<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Phonology<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> (2000) through Optimality Theory to the representational questions collected in Primitives of Phonological Structure<\/em> (2023). An open textbook on phonology is in progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Language variation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> (2026).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Language, education and policy<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poetic language and language models<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some key publications<\/h2>\n\n\n\n