Petra Sleeman, the principal investigator of the PARTE project, is a theoretical and applied linguist working in the research institute ACLC of the University of Amsterdam. Her research concerns the theoretical analysis and acquisition of Romance and Germanic languages. She participated in several NWO-funded national and international projects. She contributes to the PARTE project with her profound knowledge of the theoretical analysis of partitive elements and her research on the acquisition of partitive pronouns. As one of the authors of the French grammar for higher education Grammaire Plus (co-authors Bep Vlugter and Els Verheugd), first published in 1996 by Coutinho, Bussum, she is also interested in second language pedagogy.
Her interest in partitivity dates already from her PhD thesis Licensing Empty Nouns in French, which was published in 1996 by Holland Academic Graphics. In this thesis she claims that, in French, nominal ellipsis, just like the quantitative pronoun EN, is licensed by the partitive interpretation of a quantifier or a classifying adjective.
She also published papers on the nominal ellipsis in Spanish and on the structure of partitive constructions in French (both with Ellen-Petra Kester), on the L1 acquisition of noun ellipsis in French and in Dutch (with Aafke Hulk), on gender mismatches in partitive constructions in French, on the L2 acquisition of the French quantitative pronoun EN by L1 speakers of Dutch (both with Tabea Ihsane) and on the quantitative pronoun ER in Dutch dialects. With Anne Lobeck she wrote a chapter on Noun Ellipsis for the Blackwell Companion to Syntax, second edition.
With Aafke Hulk and Jeannette Schaeffer she is the supervisor of Sanne Berends‘ PhD project on the Dutch quantitative pronoun ER in L1, L2 and bilingual acquisition, which takes place at the University of Amsterdam.
profile Petra Sleeman