Projects
FLaCIS - First Language Acquisition of Information Structure: the acquisition of topic and focus in French. KU Leuven
From three-place predicates to auxiliary verbs in Romance languages: on the cross-linguistic equivalence of putting verbs in Spanish, Portuguese and French. Ghent University
This project aims at a comparative analysis of verbs of putting in three Romance languages: Spanish, Portuguese and French. Three near-synonymous verb pairs will be studied: poner/meter (Sp.), pôr/meter (Pt.) and poser/mettre (Fr.) from a synchronic and a diachronic angle. The intra- and cross-linguistic differences in use and the grammaticalization paths of the verbs constitute the focus of this study.
Literature, Nature, and Ecology: An Ecopoetic Approach to Contemporary French, Germanophone, Anglophone, and Italian Narrative Prose Ghent University
The project entails an ecopoetic inquiry into literary fiction on nature and ecology as a transcultural problem area within four interacting cultural regions (French, Germanophone, Anglophone, Italian). Central to this text-oriented approach are (1) the role of the literary imagination, (2) the focus on textual complexity (rhetoric) and (3) the ten-sion between the global nature of the problem and culture-bound issues.
From mass noun to count noun in French and Dutch. A contrastive corpus-based study on the nature and productivity of coercion Ghent University
This project proposes a detailed corpusbased contrastive analysis (French vs.Dutch) of a case of coercion, viz. the occasional use of mass nouns in constructions typical of count nouns, including also a limited experimental psycholinguistic verification. Besides the descriptive question (frequency, semantic effetcs, conditions/restrictions), the project addresses the question of the nature and relevance of coercion as a theoretical ...
Copular verbs out of motion verbs: a comparative analysis of French and Dutch copular systems and processes of copularization Ghent University
This project aims to study change-of-state semi-copulas, originating from verbs that express physical motion, in a Romance (French) and a Germanic (Dutch) language. The architecture of semi-copulas in both languages (cf. Construction Grammar) and the historical process(es) involved in the creation of semi-copulas (cf. Grammaticalization) are to be compared in the light of the general evolutionary path “motion > change-of-state”.
The presence of U+201CletteredU+201D memory and the literary history of the present in the U+201Ccabinets des lettrésU+201D of contemporary French literature Ghent University
Academic approaches of the narrative prose of contemporary French authors such as Quignard, Macé, Michon, Bergounioux and Puech usually stress the erudition of these writers, highlighting their continued interaction with the (French) literary tradition and the critical-theoretical canon. Via textual as well as contextual analysis, this research aims to determine to what extent the writers themselves consent and/or conform to this particular ...
Ex-OKAN + French = défi Karel De Grote Hogeschool
Preverbal indefinite subjects in spoken and written French KU Leuven
1. Background and status quaestionis
Informal (mostly spoken) (henceforth IF) and formal (typically written) French (henceforth FF) are quite different. Some authors even speak of a diglossic situation and argue in favor of the co-existence of two different grammars in French (e.g. Klein 2012; Rowlett 2013). This opposition between IF and FF is particularly evident with the expression of the subject of the clause. Whereas in FF all ...
Analysis of the continuity between the first witnesses of the French writing tradition (from the 9th C.) Ghent University
Analysis of the continuity between the first witnesses of the French writing tradition (from the 9th C.), the preceding and coexisting Latin writing tradition, and the spoken language, with the help of the notion of 'style', i.e. by drawing the map of the manners in which these registers exploited the possibilities of the language system in function of expressive aims.