Fred Weerman is professor of Language Development. He studied Dutch Language and Literature and General Linguistics at Utrecht University, where he received his doctor’s degree in 1989. In 1988 he was appointed assistant professor at this university and in 1989 associate professor. In 1998 he became also affiliated to Utrecht’s University College. He was appointed full professor of Dutch Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam in 2001. He was a visiting professor at several universities, among which Madison, Wisconsin and the Australian National University, Canberra. He was a fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in 2011. He was dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 2016 to 2022. 

Research: change and acquisition as a window on functional elements

Weerman’s research centers around the role of so-called functional elements, like verbal inflection, grammatical gender, articles and complementizers. Why do languages have these elements? Different types of language acquisition (namely by children, by adults, by speakers with a language disorder, ...), language variation and different types of language change help in finding an answer.

Keywords: change and variation, early and late acquisition, Germanic languages, Dutch, inflection.

Fred Weerman supervised several projects funded by NWO, among which Variation in Inflection, Disentangling Bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment and the CLARIN project Functional Elements in SLI. He is currently involved in the NWO Horizon Project Knowledge and Culture and the ACLC project group Grammar and Cognition. He is a member of the Amsterdam Brain and Cognition Center (ABC).

Administrative duties

Fred Weerman was recently dean of the Faculty of Humanities. Prior to this he was, amongst others, chair of the Dutch department and chair of the Landelijke Verenging van Neerlandici (LVVN) and several NWO committees. He was a member of the supervisory board of the Fryske Akademy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and served in several committees of the Taalunie. He is editor of Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, member of the editorial board of Nederlandse taalkunde and Taal en Tongval. Fred Weerman is chair of the supervisory board of CREA, the cultural organization of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Amsterdam School of Higher Education (HvA), and a member of the Advisory Council of Allard Pierson.

Jelke Bloem, Processing Verb Clusters.

Hernán Augusto Labbé Grunberg (2020), Storage and Processing of Dutch Morphological Information; Early Electrophysical Responses to Lexical, Morphological and Syntactic Information.

Caitlin Meyer (2019), Rule and Order; Acquiring Ordinals in Dutch and English.

Anna Pytlowany (2018), Ketelaar Rediscovered; The First Dutch Grammar of Persian and Hindustani (1689).

Tiffany Boersma (2018), Variability in the Acquisition of Allomorphs; The Dutch Diminutive and Past Tense.

Margot Kraaikamp (2017), Semantic versus Lexical Gender; Synchronic and Diachronic Variation in Germanic Gender Agreement.

Seid Tvica (2017), Agreement and Verb Movement; The Rich Agreement Hypothesis from a Typoligical Perspective.

Iris Duinmeijer (2017), Persistent Grammatical Difficulties in Specific Language Impairment.

Margreet van Koert (2016), Binding and Quantification in Monolingual and Bilingual Language Acquisition.

Jing Lin (2015), Acquiring Negative Polarity Items.

Daniela Polišenká (2010), Dutch Children's Acquisition of Verbal and Adjectival Inflection.

Antje Orgassa (2009), Specific Language Impairment in a Bilingual Context; The Acquisition of Dutch Inflection by Turkish-Dutch Learners.

Marianne Erkelens (2009), Learning to Categorize Verbs ands Nouns; Studies on Dutch, University of Amsterdam.

Suzanne Aalberse (2009), Inflectional Economy and Politeness; Morphology-Internal and Morphology-External Factors in the Loss of Second Person Marking in Dutch, University of Amsterdam.

Robert Cirillo (2009), The Syntax of Floating Quantifiers; Stranding Revisited, University of Amsterdam.

Robert Cloutier (2009), West Germanic OV and VO: The Status of Exceptions, University of Amsterdam. 

Irene Jacobi (2009): On Variation and Changein Diphtongs and Long Vowels of Spoken Dutch, University of Amsterdam.

Maren Pannemann (2007), DP Acquisition as Structure Unravelling, Universityof Amsterdam.

Mario van de Visser (2006), The Marked Status of Ergativity, Utrecht University.

Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul (2005), TheDevelopment of Dutch Connectives; Changeand Acquisition as Windows on Form-Function Relations, Utrecht University.

Olaf Koeneman, (2000), The Flexible Nature of Verb Movement, Utrecht University.

Petra de Wit (1998), Genitive Case and Genitive Constructions, Utrecht University.

Jacqueline van Kampen (1997), First Steps in Wh-movement, Utrecht University.

Peter Ackema (1995), Syntax below Zero, Utrecht University.

Ad Neeleman (1994), Complex Predicates, Utrecht University.