Laure Gardelle is Professor of English linguistics at Université Grenoble Alpes, France, and chair of the ALAES (the French society for the linguistics of English).
Her research deals with categorisation in the noun phrase and personal pronouns, more particularly:
- grammatical gender (the system in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions, and gender-inclusive language);
- number (grammatical number, and the semantic /plurality/ feature found in collective nouns and other types of pluralities);
- specificities in the way humans, animals or inanimates are construed in language and discourse (Animacy Hierarchy);
- anaphora and reference (for which she is part of the ANR project 'Democrat').
She is interested in the interaction between semantic features and their partial grammaticalisation, coercion mechanisms in language innovation, and competing forms of motivation in language and discourse. Her theoretical frameworks are mainly Cognitive Grammar and enunciative linguistics.