The PhD Team

I completed my BA degree in 2018 (Cum Laude) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). I graduated with a double major, in Linguistics and Politics. In 2019 I completed my honours degree (Cum Laude) in Linguistics, under the supervision of Dr Erin Pretorius. My honours research focused on a novel case of Preposition-drop (P-drop) in Kaaps expressions of accompaniment.

In July 2022, I completed my MA thesis under the supervision of Dr Erin Pretorius and Professor Theresa Biberauer. This research focused on verb-second and verb-third placement in Manenberg Kaaps.

My (principal) supervisor. Dr Erin is a theoretical syntactician by training and has worked on topics in Germanic syntax relating to the syntax interface and the morphosyntax of spatial expressions. She received her PhD in Syntax from Utrecht University, the Netherlands in 2017. ​

Erin currently works as a lecturer in the Linguistics Department of UWC in Cape Town and is the Principal Investigator on a three-year funded reach project called 'The Syntactic Ecology of Kaaps' (SEcoKa).

My (co-) supervisor. Prof Theresa specialises in theoretical, comparative and historical syntax, with interface, acquisition and contact issues also being a focus of interest. To date, much of her research has centred on the clause structure of the Germanic languages, with the peculiar patterns of variation and change exhibited by Afrikaans forming the heart of her doctoral work, and various aspects of the diachrony of English and other Germanic languages having been a major research focus since the completion of that PhD in 2003.

Theresa is also a Principal Investigator on the SEcoKa reseach project.

Prof Marjo (my UU supervisor) is professor of variational linguistics of Dutch at the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication and the Department of Dutch Language and Culture in Utrecht. She is affiliated with the UiL-OTS research institute and the Language Structure: Variation and Change research group. She is also a senior researcher at the Meertens Institute.

Her teaching and research focus mainly on the linguistics of Dutch. She is interested in syntactic variation within Dutch: the sentence structure of Dutch dialects and older phases of Dutch. She looks at these variants from a generative linguistic perspective.