Projects
The register-specificity of probabilistic grammatical knowledge in English and Dutch KU Leuven
Probabilistic grammars regulate the way in which we choose between alternative ways of saying the same thing. For example, in English people can say either "Tom sent Mary a letter", or "Tom sent a letter to Mary". Both syntactic variants have roughly the same meaning, and we know that variant choice is a function of precisely quantifiable effects of probabilistic factors such as the length of the recipient ("Mary"), or whether the recipient ...
The dynamics of correlated multiple grammatical changes in Early Modern English writers (MindBendingGrammars). University of Antwerp
HOW MUCH DOES MEANING MATTER? A FRESH LOOK AT GRAMMATICAL ALTERNATIONS KU Leuven
This project examines if and how the way people choose between different ways of saying the same thing depends on the meaning of the words in the utterance. Take variation between ditransitive dative constructions (as in “Tom sent the president a letter”) and prepositional dative constructions (as in “Tom sent a letter to the president”): variationist linguists are fairly good at modeling such variation based typically on formal predictors ...
How much does meaning matter? A fresh look at grammatical alternations KU Leuven
This project examines if and how the way people choose between different ways of saying the same thing depends on the meaning of the words in the utterance. Take variation between ditransitive dative constructions (as in “Tom sent the president a letter”) and prepositional dative constructions (as in “Tom sent a letter to the president”): variationist linguists are fairly good at modeling such variation based typically on formal predictors ...
De koppelwerkwoorden ser en estar in het licht van recente taalkundige benaderingen en van het onderzoek in tweede-taalonderwijs The copulas ser and estar in the light of recent linguistic approaches and the research in second language teaching KU Leuven
Las cópulas ser y estar a la luz de enfoques lingüísticos recientes y de la investigación en la enseñanza de segundas lenguas
The copulas ser and estar in the light of recent linguistic approaches and the research in second language teaching
Key words: Spanish, copulas, adjectival predicates, evidentiality, grammar teaching
The copulas ser and ...
The grammar of imperatives and the imperatives of grammar KU Leuven
Imperatives like Go away! or Don't touch that! are the linguistic expressions that humans use to get other humans to do, or not do, certain things (like going away or not touching something). Although imperatives are very prominent in child-directed speech, research to date has not systematically probed their significance for language acquisition. This project will address this gap in the literature, by conducting an empirically based ...
The grammar of imperatives and the imperatives of grammar. KU Leuven
Imperatives like Go away! or Don't touch that! are the linguistic expressions that humans use to get other humans to do, or not do, certain things (like going away or not touching something). Although imperatives are very prominent in child-directed speech, research to date has not systematically probed their significance for language acquisition. This project will address this gap in the literature, by conducting an empirically based ...
Collaborative grammar: the temporality and emergence of clause combination in Italian talk-in interaction KU Leuven
This research is part of a larger project on the topic of clause combination: Beyond the clause. Encoding and Inference in clause-combining (C14/18/034). In my thesis “Collaborative grammar: the temporality and emergence of clause combination in Italian talk-in-interaction”, I explore how collaborative practices of clause-combining relate to the sequential and temporal organization of turns and actions in talk-in-interaction. ...
The register-specificity of probabilistic grammars in English and Dutch - Combining corpus analysis and experimentation KU Leuven
Register variation has enjoyed plenty of attention from a text-linguistic perspective and using the Multidimensional Approach (following Biber 1988). In variationist sociolinguistics, on the other hand, register has not often been examined in interaction with language-internal constraints in morphosyntactic variation research so that register’s role in probabilistic, grammatical choice-making remains unclear. Sociolinguistic theory predicts ...