Projects
Surrealism and the "Arbitrariness" of Metaphor. A Cognitive Approach to the Poetry of Two Experimental Generations of Flemish Poets Vrije Universiteit Brussel
When accessibility meets multimedia learning: Effect of intralingual live subtitling on perception, performance and cognitive load in an EMI university lecture. University of Antwerp
What's So Funny? Absurdist Humour in Absurdist Fiction from a Cognitive Perspective Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Measuring linguistic attitudes with auditory affective priming: Attitudinal variation towards varieties of Dutch KU Leuven
The objective of this work is twofold. It sets out to contribute to the study of language attitudes on a methodological as well as a descriptive level. The main goal of the study is the methodological one. Notwithstanding some exceptions (e.g. Preston 1982), quantitative language attitude research has known little methodological innovation since the introduction of the matched-guise technique in the 1960s (Lambert et al. 1960). This relative ...
The development of small clauses in English: constructional growth and decline KU Leuven
This study investigates the development of the English Secondary Predicate Construction, against the background of current views on language change. A Secondary Predicate Construction, or SPC, consists of a verb, a noun phrase (NP), and an Xphrase (XP). The NP and XP are in a predicative relation, similar to a subject-predicate relation in a copular clause. In (1a) for instance, consider him handsome involves a verb ...
Towards a diachronic typology of the middle voice KU Leuven
The middle voice is a complex linguistic domain, as it lies at the interface between morphosyntax and the structure of the lexicon. A typical example of a middle marking language is Dutch, in which the ‘reflexive’ pronoun zich in fact behaves as a middle marker, as it is used either lexically with verbs that only occur with the reflexive, e.g. zich vergissen ‘be mistaken’, or to derive reflexives from transitive verbs, e.g. zich(zelf) slaan ...
The complex image of a God fighting for his people. A cognate-linguistic and theological-ethical study of the war narratives of het book Joshua. KU Leuven
Recent research on biblical historiography shows a growing interest in the ideological nature of history writing. Influenced by the ‘linguistic turn’ in the philosophy of history, biblical scholars started to integrate a number of critical approaches to biblical historiography to explain the relation between ideology and history in a more adequate way. The relation between ideology and language however, has not been studied systematically. ...
Language change, cultural change? Social deixis through nominal and pronominal address in the history of English KU Leuven
Address terms constitute a core resource for realizing social deixis. Because of address terms' prominent social function, changes in address systems are often attributed to cultural changes (e.g. recent changes in address between children and parents may reflect changing parent-child relationships). However, these explanations have rarely been tested on a systematic basis. Cultural explanations of changes in address usage are most convincing ...
What makes the clock tick? Concept characteristics and the speed of lexical change KU Leuven
Why are different words replaced by new synonyms at different rates? Sometimes, new variants frequently pop up (e.g. ‘awesome’ or ‘lit’ to refer to something cool), while in other cases, a single word has been used for centuries (e.g. ‘ear’). According to contemporary approaches, word-related features, like frequency, word class, length, or age of acquisition, influence the speed of lexical change (Bochkarev et al. 2014; Monaghan 2014; Pagel ...