Thomas Rainsford

Thomas Rainsford is a Lecturer at the University of Stuttgart's Institute of Linguistics, Division of Romance Linguistics. His research focuses on historical Romance linguistics, particularly phonological change, morpho-syntax, and corpus development. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and has held positions at ENS de Lyon and as a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford.

Research interests center on:

• Diachronic evolution of French, Occitan, and Italian
• Prosodic changes and phonological annotation
• Lexical and morpho-syntactic aspects of motion events
• Historical corpus development with multi-layer annotation

Publications demonstrate consistent focus on:

• Historical phonology and orthographic systems
• Syntactic change in medieval Gallo-Romance languages
• Corpus linguistics methodologies
• Computational approaches to historical texts

Awards include the British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Current research involves leading a DFG-funded project examining motion events in French and Italian through lexical and syntactic change analysis. Developed the Old Gallo-Romance Corpus (OGR) with specialized phonological and metrical annotation layers.