Dr. Nicholas Rolle is a researcher in the Research Area 3 'Syntax & Lexicon'.

His research specialization is in

• Phonology: Tone & prosody (grammatical tone); Morphophonology; Optimality Theory (Output-Output Correspondence, Agreement by Correspondence); Paradigm uniformity effects; Prosodic constituency; Vowel and consonant harmony
• Morphology: Morphosyntax/Morphophonology interface issues; Optimality Theoretic Distributed Morphology (OT-DM); Allomorphy; Subcategorization; Clitics
• Typology: Areal linguistics (phonological features over macro zones, historical correlates of linguistic areas); Typology of African languages; Language description
• Fieldwork: Nigerian languages e.g. Edoid family (Esan, Degema), Ijoid family (Izon, Kalabari), Kainji family (Agwara Kambari)