Freja Lauridsen

Job title: 
Visiting Student Researcher
Bio/CV: 

Freja Lauridsen is a Ph.D. student in linguistics at Lund University. Her research interests lie in historical language change, with a particular focus on historical morphosyntax in the Germanic languages, especially the Scandinavian languages and English. Her Ph.D. project investigates the parallel development of modal auxiliary verbs in Danish and English, including the evolution of the so-called losers of grammaticalisation - that is, preterite-present verbs that underwent partial grammaticalisation but never fully developed into modal auxiliaries. A central focus of the project is the Common Germanic etymon 'munu' and its grammaticalisation paths in Danish and English. The project adopts a corpus-based approach, drawing on historical manuscript data.