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. Lingui ...
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 ...
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 t ...
. Since 2013 she has held the
Forbes Chair of English Language 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 bein ...
in 1986. After spending some time working as a translator, she obtained her PhD in 2000 from the
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; 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, 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 iden ...
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, ...
, particularly in the domain of
syntax.
Information structure 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, and
verb-second, 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.
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