“LOT” is the acronym of “Landelijke Onderzoekschool Taalwetenschap” (‘National Research School of Linguistics’). LOT unites about 400 faculty members, 150 PhD students, and 150 Research Master students and provides a meeting point to further national and international communication for the benefit of linguistic research and education. Researchers from the participating institutes share knowledge, work together on theoretical and methodological matters, discuss their data and research in seminars and lecture series and in collaborations of various other kinds.
LOT organizes the nationwide training of graduate students in linguistics. Every year, a LOT Winter School is held in January, and a LOT Summer School takes place in June/July. Another important branch of LOT is the dissertation series: all LOT graduate students can publish their dissertation with LOT.
LOT was officially established in June 1994 by the the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The LOT school series soon acquired an international reputation as a result of inviting well-known linguists to teach at the schools.
The research by the LOT institutes covers all major areas of linguistics, and exploits a wide range of methodological tools and theoretical frameworks. Recent evaluations of participating institutes and of LOT itself are outstanding, and corroborate the excellent quality of linguistic research in the Netherlands.
LOT is one of the 16 national graduate schools in the humanities united in LOGOS, the Council of Dutch Research Schools in the Humanities.
The LOT directorate and office rotate over the institutes, and are currently based at the University of Amsterdam (since 2019).
Scientific mission of LOT
The human ability to use language to communicate requires the ability to structure knowledge, to produce and interpret linguistic resources, and to use them in context. This ability is normally developed in childhood (language acquisition). Many thousands of languages are spoken worldwide, most of them not mutually intelligible and many of them displaying rich dialectal variation, which multiplies the diversity. Progress in our understanding of language and its role in fulfilling the communicative needs of a complex, often multilingual society is only possible through an analysis of all the different factors involved. Results are relevant to education, language & speech technology, and healthcare. Research in LOT focuses on the following issues: “What are the cognitive faculties that underlie the structure, acquisition and use of human language?”, “What principles govern interaction through language?”, “How are these properties of language embedded in a broader social context?”
The aim of LOT is to create a scientific community in which linguistic research can be optimally pursued, and to educate the next generation of researchers with an open mind toward new disciplinary and interdisciplinary developments, theoretical and methodological alternatives, and possible applications. LOT stimulates new initiatives and developments in research, and provides a national forum to further communication between the participating institutes with a view to short- and long-term collaboration. LOT enhances an effective curriculum for graduate students in linguistics committed to excellence with an optimal combination of national and local educational activities. International communication is stimulated for the benefit of research and education.
Institutes associated with LOT
Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication
The Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC) is a research institute of the University of Amsterdam, in which researchers studying linguistics in its broadest sense collaborate. The ACLC focuses on the study of both functionally and formally oriented linguistic research. The strength of ACLC is the broadness of its research and the interaction between the different types of approaches.
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
LUCL is a research institute and graduate school of the linguists at the Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University. It unites the linguistic research and teaching at Leiden University. LUCL is also responsible for the Academic Language Centre as well as for most language teaching within the Faculty.
Center for Language Studies Nijmegen
The Nijmegen Centre for Language Studies (CLS; www.ru.nl/cls) is part of the Radboud University’s Faculty of Arts. Its researchers work in interdisciplinary teams focusing on language systems and their variation, language processing and cognition, discourse and communication, and first and second language acquisition. They investigate language in all its modalities, from speech and text to gestures, signs, and images. CLS highly values diversity in research techniques, applying observational, behavioural and neurocognitive methods, as well as computational modelling and automatic analysis of collections of text, speech and signs.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam – Department of Language, Literature & Communication
Linguistic research of the faculty of Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA) is highly cross-disciplinary in its orientation and organisation. Linguistic researchers are members of the interdisciplinary and cross-faculty Network Institute. Research centers within the Network Institute put this cross-disciplinary approach into practice, e.g. the Amsterdam Gesture Center, the Language and Hearing Center Amsterdam and the Computational Lexicology and Terminology Lab. Focal areas of linguistic research are English as a second language, multimodal communication, linguistic typology, language use in medical and forensic settings, computer modelling of natural language, and language acquisition in children with hearing difficulties.
Center for Language and Cognition Groningen
The Center for Language and Cognition Groningen is a research institute within the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen. It is the institutional home for all the linguistic research carried out within the faculty. CLCG is also affiliated with various research schools. These are Dutch organisations which seek to coordinate scientific activity on a supra-faculty, or even national, level.
Institute for Language Sciences (ILS)
The Institute for Language Sciences is a research institute of the Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University. ILS aims at developing scientific expertise in the systems underlying language, speech and their use. It sets out to achieve this goal by carrying out a research programme comprising fundamental research in these areas, by furthering the application of the insights thus obtained, and by offering a high-quality graduate programme to qualified PhD-students. ILS participates in the national research school LOT and also in the graduate Network Logica.
Meertens Instituut (KNAW)
The Meertens Institute, established in 1926, has been a research institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, KNAW) since 1952. It studies the diversity in language and culture in the Netherlands. The focus is on contemporary research into factors that play a role in determining social identities in the Dutch society. The main fields are: 1. ethnological study of the function, meaning and coherence of cultural expressions 2. structural, dialectological and sociolinguistic study of language variation within Dutch in the Netherlands, with an emphasis on grammatical and onomastic variation. Research results are presented in a number of publications. The institute also publishes its own books. It also organizes workshops, symposiums and conferences on a regular basis. Apart from research, the institute also concerns itself with documentation and providing information to third parties in the field of Dutch language and culture. It possesses a large library, with numerous collections and a substantive documentation system, of which databases are a substantive part.
Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences (TSHD)
Linguists at TSHD reside in two departments. The Department of Communication and Cognition (DCC) is responsible for the Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC), which conducts interdisciplinary research into cognitive and social aspects of human communication. Research domains include communication and technology, cross-cultural communication, computational linguistics, information visualisation, marketing and business communication, language production, and non-verbal communication. Methods include experimentation, surveys, corpus analyses and computational modeling. The Department of Culture Studies (DCU) comprises research that focuses on the synergies between digital culture, multimodality, intermediality and socio-cultural diversity. Examples illustrating the broad range of research topics in the Department can be seen in the department’s online journal Diggit.
Fryske Akademy, Department of Linguistics
The Fryske Akademy undertakes fundamental and applied research on the Frisian context with studies of the Frisian language, history, and culture in Frisian society, from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. The Fryske Akademy is founded on wide-ranging expertise in the area of the Frisian language. Using our specialist knowledge, we tell the stories of Friesland, in which language, culture, history, landscape and identity are all linked. Our research agenda is focused on extending the boundaries of knowledge and putting Frisian Studies firmly on the international map. In other words, the Fryske Akademy is the scientific research institute for the Frisian context, rooted in Frisian society and operating in the international world of academia.
Maastricht University – Department of Literature & Art, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
The sociolinguistic research at Maastricht University, situated within the research program Arts, Media and Culture (AMC) of the Faculty of the Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) has four characteristics which together make it quite unique in the Netherlands. First, this research is informed by an interdisciplinary approach with either a more linguistic or a more anthropological focus. Secondly, this research is geared to including animals deploying ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods. Thirdly, it puts societal concerns centerstage in the formulation of research questions, and this specifically pertains to the challenge of inclusion and exclusion practices through language use, and language ideologies. Finally, it focuses on language practices as part of the process of social semiosis, i.e., as the locus of regional, social, and human (species) identity formation. The basic concern of its research is to investigate how different actors (individually as well as collectively) engage with power dynamics and how they make use of linguistic resources in identity construction.
University of Antwerp Linguistics Department
The University of Antwerp Linguistics Department unites researchers who study language in use from various methodological angles and houses two research groups. The CLiPS (Computational Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics) research center undertakes research in and produces resources for (developmental) psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and computational linguistics, and investigates the interdisciplinary combinations of these disciplines. The Grammar and Pragmatics (GaP) research center focuses on the study of (linguistic) meaning in all its forms. Its members share a keen interest in functional-cognitive grammar, linguistic pragmatics, and business communication.
KU Leuven
The Department of Linguistics at KU Leuven has a long-standing tradition of high-quality and internationally oriented research and training covering a wide range of approaches to the study of language, including synchronic and diachronic analysis, the cross-linguistic study of language, language acquisition, multimodal and interactional linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. At the same time, researchers are involved in research on and training of languages from around the world. These varied interests are reflected in the six research groups of the department, which all have their own specific focus in terms of theoretical framework, methodological expertise, and topics and language(s) under investigation. In addition, the department is strongly linked to different (interdisciplinary) research centres and labs.
Brussels Centre for Language Studies (BCLS)
The Brussels Centre for Language studies is a research centre at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The centre hosts all linguists at VUB and unites three strands of research: language and society, language learning and education, and language, brain and cognition. BCLS researchers take a usage-based perspective to linguistics and share an interest in multilingualism, particularly in urban contexts.
National collaboration
LOT collaborates with a number of other graduate schools and research institutes on curricular matters, knowledge utilisation and research infrastructure. These include:
LOT senior researchers are prominent members of the international linguistic community. For international collaborations of various research groups, see the institutional websites.
Outreach
LOT actively promotes sharing of knowledge between academics and a professional and general public. As these actions target a Dutch audience, most of these outreach activities are carried out in Dutch.
Schultink Lecture
During every LOT school, one of the international instructors delivers the Schultink Lecture. The lecture is named after Henk Schultink (1924-2017), who played a central role in founding LOT.
NEMO Kennislink
The member institutes of LOT jointly finance popular science articles on Linguistics at the NEMO Kennislink website. This website is dedicated to making results of scientific research accessible to the lay audience, and is especially popular with students from secondary schools.
Populariseringprijs
Every year LOT awards a prize for a product that makes results of linguistics research accessible for a broad audience. The jury consists of linguist researchers and other language professionals, such as journalists, editors, and bloggers. The product may take any kind of shape: books, journals, websites, radio or TV programs, course materials, articles, etc. The prize is awarded during the Grote Taaldag (see below).
The regulations for the prize (in Dutch), can be found on a separate page. An overview of all awardees (in Dutch) can be found here.
De Grote Taaldag
De Grote Taaldag is organised by LOT in cooperation with the Linguistics Association of the Netherlands (AVT) and the Dutch Association for Applied Linguistics (Anéla). This day combines the AVT TIN-dag (Linguistics-in-the-Netherlands day), and the Anéla TTiN-dag (Applied-Linguistics-in-the-Netherlands day), with the Taalgala (Language-Gala). During the Taalgala the AVT/Anéla Dissertation Prize and the LOT-Popularisation prize are awarded.
Other activities
Other outreach activities in The Netherlands that target language are:
The Taalportaal (Language portal), which offers scientific grammars of Dutch, Frisian, and Afrikaans (in English).
The Drongo Language Festival.
Management structure
The LOT management structure involves a director, a board, a management committee and a curriculum committee.
LOT Director
The LOT director is responsible for the school’s daily affairs. Tasks include drafting research plans, graduate programs, and the annual report, and submitting these to the board for approval. He/she is also responsible for the school’s budget. The director functions as secretary to the board, and participates in the board meetings.
The present director of the school is Prof. dr. Judith Rispens.
LOT Board
The LOT board is responsible for all activities and initiatives undertaken in the context of the graduate school. The board’s formal tasks are:
- to approve a general research plan, once every 5 years, and short term research actions;
- to approve a general graduate programme for LOT-students and a specific curriculum proposal twice a year;
- to approve the annual budget for the school.
The board must have at least one representative of each of the participating institutes, who elect a chair person from their midst. The members of the present board are:
- Prof. Dr. Leonie Cornips (Maastricht)
- Dr. Maria Mos (Tilburg)
- Dr. Mark Dingemanse (Nijmegen)
- Dr. Rik van Gijn (Leiden)
- Prof. dr. Janet Fuller (Groningen)
- Dr. Khalid Mourigh (Meertens Instituut)
- Dr. Roland Pfau (Amsterdam-UvA)
- Dr. Antoinette Schapper (Amsterdam-VU)
- Prof. dr. Hans Van de Velde (Fryske Akademy)
- Dr. Astrid De Wit (Antwerp)
- Dr. Joost Zwarts (Utrecht)
- Sanne van der Wal (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), RM student representative
- Jiqiang Lu (KU Leuven), PhD representative
- Natalia Rivera Vera (Utrecht), Postdoc representative
Management committee
The LOT management committee executes the various activities and plans determined or approved by the board. The committee consists of the directors of each of the institutes/groups and meets on a regular basis. The management committee is chaired by the LOT director. The members of the present management committee are:
- Prof. dr. Judith Rispens (LOT), chair
- Prof. dr. Enoch Aboh (Amsterdam-UvA)
- Prof. dr. Sjef Barbiers (Leiden)
- Prof. dr. Norbert Corver (Utrecht)
- Prof. dr. Enny Das (Nijmegen)
- Dr. Nelleke IJssennagger-van der Pluijm (Fryske Akademy)
- Prof. dr. Marjo van Koppen (Meertens Instituut)
- Dr. Tessa van Leeuwen (Tilburg)
- Prof. dr. Petra Hendriks (Groningen)
Curriculum committee
The LOT curriculum committee assists in the development and co-ordination of the LOT graduate program. It consists of representatives of each of the participating institutes/groups, and two representatives of the graduate students, who are each year changing according to the local organisations of the upcoming LOT Schools. The committee also has a general curriculum coordinator, who acts as secretary to the committee. This position is held by Tessa Arneri. The present curriculum committee consists of:
- Dr. María Sol Sansiñena Pascual (Leuven)
- Dr. Silke Hamann (Amsterdam-UvA)
- Dr. Angeliek van Hout (Groningen)
- Dr. Gerrit Jan Kootstra (Nijmegen)
- Dr. David Peeters (Tilburg)
- Dr. Tijmen Pronk (Leiden)
- Dr. Maaike Schoorlemmer (Utrecht)
- Dr. Hennie van der Vliet (Amsterdam-VU)
The organisational tasks for the graduate program, including the Summer and Winter schools, are jointly carried out by the curriculum coordinator, Tessa Arneri, and the director of LOT, prof. dr. Judith Rispens.
LOT Staff
The LOT-office is formed by the following staff members:
Director – Prof. dr. Judith Rispens
Coordinator LOT Schools and Dissertation Series – Tessa Arneri
Office manager – Jan Martin
Student assistant – Svea Bösch
Research Master Student Representative – Sanne van der Wal
If you wish to contact the Research Master student representative, you can do so by writing a mail to: s.f.vander.wal(at)student.vu.nl.
PhD Representative – Jiqiang Lu
If you wish to contact the PhD Representative, you can do so by writing a mail to: jiqiang.lu(at)kuleuven.be.
Postdoc Representative – Natalia Rivera Vera
If you wish to contact the Postdoc Representative, you can do so by writing a mail to: n.a.riveravera(at)uu.nl.
