Bettelou Los is a

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

and

philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as th ...

specializing in the history of the

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...

. Since 2013 she has held the

Forbes Chair of English Language The Forbes Chair of English Language is a chair at the University of Edinburgh. It is one of a number of chairs founded in the 1940s following a bequest by East India mechant and Edinburgh alumnus Daniel Mackintosh Forbes. Its original title was th ...

at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

Academic career

Los received her MA from the

University of Amsterdam The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, nl, Universiteit van Amsterdam) is a public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The UvA is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other being ...

in 1986. After spending some time working as a translator, she obtained her PhD in 2000 from the

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (abbreviated as ''VU Amsterdam'' or simply ''VU'' when in context) is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, being founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research ...

; her dissertation focused on infinitives in Old and Middle English. From 2004 she held positions as lecturer first at the Vrije Universiteit and then at

Radboud University Nijmegen Radboud University (abbreviated as RU, nl, Radboud Universiteit , formerly ''Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen'') is a public research university located in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The university bears the name of Saint Radboud, a 9th century D ...

, where she was promoted to senior lecturer in 2008, before moving to Edinburgh in 2013.

Research

Los is known for her work on

language change Language change is variation over time in a language's features. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics. Traditional theories of historical linguistics identify ...

in the history of English and other early

Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, Engli ...

, particularly in the domain of

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...

Information structure In linguistics, information structure, also called information packaging, describes the way in which information is formally packaged within a sentence.Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. ''Information structure and sentence form.'' Cambridge: Cambridge Univer ...

and its interaction with syntactic change has played an important role in her more recent work. Her book on the rise of the ''to''-infinitive in English is the standard reference on that subject, and she has also carried out important work on discourse adverbs,

particles In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscule in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from s ...

, and

verb-second In syntax, verb-second (V2) word order is a sentence structure in which the finite verb of a sentence or a clause is placed in the clause's second position, so that the verb is preceded by a single word or group of words (a single constituent). ...

, among other topics. She is also the author of a textbook on English historical syntax and co-editor of the handbook on the history of the English language along with

Ans van Kemenade Ans van Kemenade (born 1954 in Eindhoven) is a Dutch professor of English linguistics at the Radboud University Nijmegen specializing in the history of the English language. Biography Van Kemenade studied English and linguistics at Utrecht Univers ...

Selected publications

* Los, Bettelou. 2005. ''The rise of the'' to-''infinitive''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. * van Kemenade, Ans and Bettelou Los (eds.). 2006. ''The handbook of the history of English''. Oxford: Blackwell. * van Kemenade, Ans and Bettelou Los. 2006. Discourse adverbs and clausal syntax in Old and Middle English. In van Kemenade and Los (eds.), 224–248. * Los, Bettelou. 2009. The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English: information structure and syntax in interaction. ''English Language and Linguistics'' 13 (1), 97-125. * Los, Bettelou, and Gea Dreschler. 2012. The loss of local anchoring: from adverbial local anchors to permissive subjects. In Elizabeth C. Traugott and Terttu Nevalainen (eds.), ''The Oxford handbook of the history of English''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. * Los, Bettelou, Corrien Blom, Geert Booij, Marion Elenbaas and Ans van Kemenade. 2012. ''Morphosyntactic change: a comparative study of particles and prefixes''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Meurman-Solin, Anneli, Maria José López-Couso and Bettelou Los (eds.). 2012. ''Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Los, Bettelou. 2012. The Loss of Verb-Second and the Switch from Bounded to Unbounded Systems. In Meurman-Solin et al. (eds.), 21–46. * Los, Bettelou. 2015. ''A historical syntax of English''. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

References

Living people Grammarians from the Netherlands Corpus linguists Syntacticians Historical linguists of English Academics of the University of Edinburgh University of Amsterdam alumni Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam alumni Year of birth missing (living people) {{Linguist-stub