Holly Kennard
I am currently a Departmental Lecturer in Linguistics with French within the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at Oxford University. I am also a Retained Lecturer at Pembroke College, and organise Linguistics teaching there.
I held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship for 3 years from 2016, investigating the impact of language decline and revitalisation in Breton context. I looked in particular at metrical stress and grammatical gender.
Following this I continued research in this area whilst teaching Phonetics and Phonology as a Departmental Lecturer. Most recently, I have begun examining intonation in Breton, for which I received a grant from the John Fell Fund.
I am very pleased to remain associated with the Language and Brain Laboratory. My doctoral research also focused on Breton, and I was based in the Language and Brain Lab. I was particularly interested in how different generations of Breton speakers were using word order and initial consonant mutation. My supervisor was Prof Aditi Lahiri.
Following my DPhil, I worked first as a Research Assistant, and then as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the WORDS project team within the Language and Brain Lab. I helped with psycholinguistic experiments, both behavioural and EEG, and my own work examined phonological adaptation in loanwords across a number of different languages.
Recent publications:
Kennard, Holly J. (to appear) ‘Breton Mutation’ in Joseph F. Eska, Silva Nurmio, Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh & Paul Russell (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Celtic Linguistics and Languages
Kennard, Holly J. (to appear) ‘Modern Breton Morphology’ in Joseph F. Eska, Silva Nurmio, Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh & Paul Russell (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Celtic Linguistics and Languages
Kennard, Holly J. & Aditi Lahiri. (to appear) 'At the interfaces: indigenous and non-indigenous sources of phonological change' in Adam Ledgeway (ed.) The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Diachronic Linguistics
Kennard, Holly J. 2024. 'Prosodic change in Breton: the loss of stressed clitics' Transactions of the Philological Society 122(2): 254-280
Kennard, Holly J. 2021. ‘Variation in Breton word stress: new speakers and the influence of French’ Phonology 38(3): 363-399
