Marieke Meelen

Trinity Hall, room B8

Trinity Lane

Cambridge, UK, CB2 1TJ

mm986[at]cam[dot]ac[dot]uk

I’m interested in how and why languages change, specifically the morphosyntax of Tibeto-Burman and Celtic languages. I use and develop NLP tools to get more and better-annotated data from historical manuscripts (Handwritten Text Recognition) and endangered-language fieldwork (Automatic Speech Recognition). In Cambridge term time, I co-organise the Historical Linguistics Reading Group.

I’m currently involved in the following research projects:

AHRC-funded `Emergence of Egophoricity’ (Co-I with Prof Nathan Hill)
CHRG-funded `Teaching materials for endangered languages’ (PI)
ELDP-funded `An audio-visual archive of Dzardzongke’ (PI)
ERC-funded `PaganTibet’ (External Advisor)

I supervise graduate students who are interested in linguistic questions about morphosyntactic change and language documentation of endangered languages. If you’re interested in applying for a PhD with me, please send me an email with a brief description of your research question and planned methodology.

Current and past PhD students and postdocs and their topics:

Sarah Gordon: Acquisition and change in the history of English and BSL
Luca Gal: Language contact in evaluative morphology
Anna Danilova: Comparative syntax of converbs (adverbial participles)
Nora Dehmke: Syntactic reconstruction of passives in Celtic
Kitty Liu: Diachrony of clause chaining in Tibetic languages
Stephen Mulraney: Linguistic features of Old Tibetan
Dr Rachael M. Griffiths: Tibetan HTR & NLP
Dr Christian Faggionato: Tibetan & Dzardzongke NLP
Dr Liwen Liu: Egophoricity in Newar
Dr Mathieu Beaudouin: Tangut and Horpa languages
Dr Alexander O’Neill: Historical Newar NLP
Dr Mark Darling: Null subjects in the history of Irish

selected publications

Syntactic Reanalysis

Marieke Meelen

In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Diachronic and Historical Linguistics , pp. 1-25

Bib Link

@incollection{meelen2026_syntacticreanalysis,
  author = {Meelen, Marieke},
  title = {Syntactic Reanalysis},
  year = {2026},
  pages = {1-25},
  publisher = {John Wiley \& Sons, Ltd},
  keywords = {acquisition, actuation, reanalysis, syntax},
  booktitle = {The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Diachronic and Historical Linguistics}
}

Reconstructing the rise of Verb Second in Welsh

Marieke Meelen

In Rethinking Verb Second , pp. 426–454

Bib Link

@incollection{meelen2020reconstructing,
  title = {Reconstructing the rise of Verb Second in Welsh},
  author = {Meelen, Marieke},
  booktitle = {Rethinking Verb Second},
  editor = {Woods, Rebecca and Wolfe, Sam},
  year = {2020},
  pages = {426–454},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press}
}

What are cognates?

Marieke Meelen, Nathan W Hill, and Hannes Fellner

Papers in Historical Phonology , 7 , pp. 44-80

Bib Link

@article{meelen2023cognates,
  title = {What are cognates?},
  author = {Meelen, Marieke and Hill, Nathan W and Fellner, Hannes},
  journal = {Papers in Historical Phonology},
  year = {2022},
  volume = {7},
  pages = {44-80},
  doi = {10.2218/pihph.7.2022.7405},
  publisher = {Edinburgh University Library}
}

Breakthroughs in Tibetan NLP & Digital Humanities

Marieke Meelen, Sebastian Nehrdich, and Kurt Keutzer

Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines , 72 , pp. 5-25

Bib Link

@article{meelen2024breakthroughs,
  title = {Breakthroughs in Tibetan NLP \& Digital Humanities},
  author = {Meelen, Marieke and Nehrdich, Sebastian and Keutzer, Kurt},
  year = {2024},
  volume = {72},
  pages = {5-25},
  journal = {Revue d'Etudes Tib\'etaines},
  publisher = {Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris}
}

Syntactic reconstruction in Celtic

Marieke Meelen

In Foundational approaches to Celtic linguistics , pp. 417–467

Bib Link

@incollection{meelen2025syntacticreconstruction,
  title = {Syntactic reconstruction in Celtic},
  author = {Meelen, Marieke},
  booktitle = {Foundational approaches to Celtic linguistics},
  editor = {Carnie, Andrew and Ohala, Diane and Hunter, Dee and Prins, Samantha and Hammond, Michael and Irizarry, Luis},
  pages = {417–467},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.15654879},
  publisher = {Language Science Press}
}