Rate My Professor Frederic Dichtel

Frederic Dichtel is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Languages and Cultures, School of Arts, Humanities Division at the University of Otago. He contributes to the German programme and is listed among the staff of the French Programme. Located in the Arts Building in Dunedin, he supports language education and has been involved in departmental activities, including celebrations for colleagues receiving honours such as the French National Order of Merit. Dichtel also serves as a translator and linguistics tutor, collaborating on projects like the design of a translation prototype in 2016 with University of Otago scientists Dr Romain Garby and Dr Alice Harang.

Dichtel's research employs corpus-based methods within cognitive linguistics to analyze grammatical usage. His peer-reviewed article, 'A quantifier used on many occasions: Many evoking diversity in positive sentences,' was published in the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (Volume 21, Issue 1, pages 80-104, 2016). Affiliated with the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago, the study examines constraints on 'many' versus 'a lot of' with plural count nouns in positive sentences. Corpus analysis reveals that 'many' denotes heterogeneous and discrete quantities, showing affinity for nouns of place and time in adverbial phrases and personal nouns in subject positions, while associating awkwardly with homogeneous substances in object noun phrases. This empirical approach challenges prescriptive grammar rules lacking corpus evidence. More recently, Dichtel is investigating the spatial uses of prepositions 'i' and 'ki' in te reo Māori through a corpus of 300 paragraphs from Māori translations. His presentation, 'The Elusive I and Ki,' at the Linguistic Society of New Zealand Conference 2025 identifies cues linking 'ki' to verbs entailing motion (e.g., tae 'arrive') and 'i' to static activities (e.g., tatari 'wait'), aiming to provide learner guidelines and explore Māori perspective (tirohanga). He has translated materials for academic publications, including French archival records and victimology texts.