Barbara Vance
• Associate Professor of
French Linguistics
• Associate Professor of
Linguistics
Office: Ballantine Hall
617
Office Phone: 855-2702
E-mail: bvance @indiana.edu
Research areas:
French linguistics, syntax, history of French (including Occitan)
Education:
- PhD, Cornell, 1989
- MA, Cornell, 1981
- AB, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1979
Background:
I am interested in understanding how and why language changes, and particularly in changes in syntactic systems (= changes in word order or in relations among parts of sentences). Although observation of contemporary variation and change-in-progress is important to my work, my primary focus is the 1200-year history of written French, a time period that is large enough for us to see the reflection of major upheavals in grammatical patterns. My investigation of syntactic change is couched in terms of contemporary generative syntactic theory, and my most recent research adds a dialectological and cross-linguistic perspective by examining regional variation in Old French and Old Occitan (the language of southern France).
Selected awards:
- Trustees’ Teaching Award 2007 and 2003
- Honorary Faculty member, IU Chapter of Golden Key Society, inducted 2006
- Teaching Excellence Recognition Award, 1997
Courses recently taught:
- Advanced French Grammar
- Introduction to French Linguistics
- French Morphology
- French Syntax
- Syntactic Analysis
- History of French I and II
- Advanced Syntax
- Diachronic Syntax
Publication highlights:
Books
Syntactic Change in Medieval French (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997)
Contemporary Approaches to Romance Linguistics edited with Julie Auger and J. Clancy Clements (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004)
