The Faculty is delighted to announce that Aditi Lahiri, the Professor of Linguistics, has become the first Oxford academic to be awarded a third prestigious advanced Investigator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). The grants, worth up to 2.5 million Euros, are among the most prestigious in academia.

Professor Lahiri’s grant will examine the principle of Pertinacity, by studying comparable phonological processes internal to individual languages as well as influences due to borrowing between languages across Germanic and Indo-Aryan language families, combining classical historical research with psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experimentation and computational speech recognition.

The Chair of the Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics Faculty Board, said, “Aditi's work has already been instrumental in showing that we need to take seriously the idea that structural features of a sound system survive in the long term - that they are pertinacious. By investigating this phenomenon on an unprecedented scale and using both traditional and emerging techniques, her new project will make a huge difference to linguists in many different areas of the field. The Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics is very proud to congratulate her.”

In addition to an unprecedented three Advanced Investigator Grants, Professor Lahiri has received two proof of concept grants from the ERC. You can read more about this story on the University website.