Petra Sleeman is a senior linguist working in the department of Linguistics and the research institute ACLC of the University of Amsterdam. She also worked at the University of Utrecht and the University of Groningen. She was an invited assistant professor at the University Paris VII and the University Paris III and an invited professor at the University Lille III. She graduated in 1996 with a thesis on nominal ellipsis titled Licensing Empty Nouns in French, which was supervised by Aafke Hulk and Denis Delfitto. Petra Sleeman's main topic of research is the French DP: the position of adjectives, adjectival agreement, noun ellipsis, relative clauses and reduced relatives, the partitive construction, definiteness, deverbal nominalization and deverbal adjectivalization, and dislocation of DPs. Another research field is L1, 2L1, and L2 acquisition. She is the PI of the European network PARTE (Partitivity in European Languages).
Licensing Empty Nouns in French (1996)
(supervision with Aafke Hulk and Suzanne Aalberse) Brechje van Osch: Vulnerability in heritage speakers of Spanish in the Netherlands. An interplay between language-internal and language-external factors.
(supervision with Aafke Hulk) Rosalinde Stadt: The influence of Dutch (L1) and English (L2) on Third Language Learning: The Effects of Education, Development and Language Combinations.
(supervision with Aafke Hulk and Jeannette Schaeffer) Sanne Berends: Acquiring Dutch quantitative ER.
(supervision with Enoch Aboh) Thom Westveer: Gender mismatches in partitive constructions in French and German. How society shapes language.
For information (in Dutch) on the courses that Petra Sleeman gives this year at the University of Amsterdam, see:
The International Network on Partitivity in European Languages (PARTE) was initiated in 2017 and involves 18 researchers from 11 European universities:
Petra Sleeman (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands) (PI)
Enoch Aboh (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Leonie Cornips (Meertens Institute, the Netherlands)
Elisabeth Stark, Elvira Glaser, Tabea Ihsane, Paul Widmer (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
Giuliana Giusti and Anna Cardinaletti (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy)
Silvia Luraghi (University of Pavia, Italy)
Anne Tamm (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary)
Cecilia Poletto and Thomas Strobel (Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Germany)
Ilja A. Seržant (University of Potsdam, Germany)
Tuomas Huumo and Ilmari Ivaska (University of Turku, Finland)
Urtzi Etxeberria (CNRS, Bayonne, France)
David Paul Gerards (University of Mainz, Germany)
The network is funded by an NWO Internationalisation in the Humanities grant, awarded to Petra Sleeman.
This collaboration aims to contribute to our understanding of the emergence, spread and vulnerability of partitive elements (partitive determiners, partitive pronouns and partitive case) in European languages and dialects.
In addition to organizing meetings with the network members, we have organized three larger international workshops (Venice, Pavia and Budapest), published several volumes and special issues of journals, construed a website serving as a digital platform informing teachers and policy makers, and set up a database of linguistic maps.