2022 - 2023 | Dr Louise Esher
Louise Esher is a TORCH International Fellow during Trinity Term 2023, hosted by Professor Martin Maiden and Dr Xavier Bach. Their project, on ‘Gender-neutral and gender-inclusive language: the view from linguistic theory’, brings the rigorous analytic and formal techniques of descriptive linguistics to the study of gender-neutral and gender-inclusive language (i.e. language which is non-discriminatory with respect to sex and gender). The project explores how neutral and inclusive forms arise from a complex interaction between language typology, linguistic creativity, social pressures and speakers’ existing knowledge of their language. Its findings lay an informed foundation for developing language strategies that are easy for the existing population of native speakers to adopt in their everyday usage.
Louise is a historical linguist and inflectional morphologist whose research focuses on the relationships between inflectional change and the structure of inflectional systems, combining the insights of computational modelling, comparative study of modern dialects, and diachronic study of historical sources. Before joining the CNRS in 2016, Louise held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, University of Oxford.
As well as publishing in journals including Journal of Linguistics, Diachronica, Morphology, Word Structure, Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie and Revue Romane, Louise is the co-editor of the Manuel de linguistique occitane (with Jean Sibille, CNRS; De Gruyter, forthcoming) and Comparative and dialectal approaches to analogy: Inflection in Romance and beyond (with Xavier Bach, Trinity College, University of Oxford and Sascha Gaglia, Freie Universität Berlin; OUP, forthcoming), and a contributor to works including the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Linguistics, Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics and Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Diachronic Linguistics.
Dr Esher is TORCH International Fellow during Trinity Term, 2023, and is hosted by Professor Martin Maiden and Dr Xavier Bach in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics
