Dr Marieke Meelen

Marieke Meelen’s research interests include information structure, comparative syntax and historical linguistics. She is currently mainly working on the history of V2 word orders across Indo-European languages, but is also interested in the syntax of languages of the Himalayan region, in particular Nepali, Tibetan and Tamangish languages like Kaike.

Her doctoral thesis combined methods from computational and historical linguistics to reconstruct verb-initial and verb-second word order patterns and information structure in Welsh in their Celtic historical context. She is also a computational linguistic consultant for a project on the annotation of Middle Welsh texts at the Philipps-Universität in Marburg.

Marieke was awarded her PhD at Leiden University in 2016 supervised by Prof Lisa Cheng and Prof Alexander Lubotsky. As part of her PhD, she conducted research in Wales and the University of Cambridge as a visiting student.