Dr Alice Violet

I grew up and studied in France. I studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (then known at ENS LSH), where I completed degrees in English, history and linguistics (BA in English and BA in History jointly with Lyon II University ; agrégation externe in English ;  M. Phil in English Linguistics). I then completed a funded doctorate in Contrastive Linguistics at Paris IV-Sorbonne University, with a thesis on determinerless prepositional phrases in French and English. In 2012, I started teaching at Worcester College, where I held the Besse Senior Scholarship. I became a teaching fellow and Governing Body member of the college in 2017 and am now also a lecturer at Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh’s College.

My current role is teaching-oriented. My past research includes corpus-based work on the semantics of prepositions and determiners, fixedness in language, Construction Grammar and discourse markers. I am particularly interested in the interface between grammar and the lexicon, in phraseological approaches to language, and in attitudes towards language. My background in linguistics informs my teaching practice.

I started teaching in higher education when I was a postgraduate student, and before working at Oxford I held four different teaching positions at the University of Cambridge and at Paris IV-Sorbonne University. I taught a broad range of classes to students of French and English, in formats ranging from tutorials to lectures. I currently teach the following classes to Oxford undergraduates (all years) : translation from English into French ; French grammar ; essay in French ; French summary ; oral practice ; listening comprehension.

2017. Les syntagmes prépositionnels spatiaux sans déterminant de type [on N] et [sur N] : proposition d’analyse constructionnelle. In P.Prescod (ed.), Approches plurielles du nom sans déterminant. Bruxelles: Peter Lang.

2017. Les SP à article zéro : des unités phraséologiques mal connues. In F. Grossmann, S. Mejri et I. Sfar (eds.), La phraséologie: sémantique, syntaxe, discours. Paris: Honoré Champion.

2016 [Être prép N]/ [BE prép N] : les effets sémantiques de l’absence de déterminant dans le SP spatial prédicatif, étude de corpus. Linguisticae Investigationes Supplementa 32.

2016. Localisation négative et détermination: du constituant au syntagme et à la construction. Modèles linguistiques XXXVII, vol. 73.

2013.  L’article zéro après la préposition en français : une ‘absence’ signifiante : l’exemple des syntagmes prépositionnels spatiaux de type [sous N]. In L. Fesenmeier, A. Grutschus and C. Patzelt (eds.), L’absence au niveau syntagmatique : Fallstudien zum Französischen. Frankfurt : Klostermann.

2012. Le syntagme prépositionnel sans déterminant en français, étude de corpus. In L. Saussure and A. Rihs (eds.), Etudes de sémantique et pragmatique françaises. Bern : Peter Lang.  

2011 [Preposition+noun] sequences in English and the question of fixedness. In B. Pennec and O. Simonin (eds.), Les locutions de l’anglais: emplois et strategies rhétoriques. Perpignan : Presses Universitaires de Perpignan.