Projects
Provincial cities at war. Local public spheres in German, Belgian and Dutch towns in the border region compared (1914-1919) Ghent University
The core aim of this doctoral research is to write an international comparative history about local public spheres in a border region during the First World War. Public spheres are central spheres of social life. If we want to understand the various changes and its consequences for everyday life, it is absolutely necessary to examine the transformation of the public spheresduring wartime.In order to attain significant results, we are dealing ...
Academic literacy in German as a foreign language: A corpus-based contrastive analysis of cohesion in written learner language. University of Antwerp
The poetics of precarity: Representations of the worker in German literature in the aftermath of the 'Great Depression' (1873-1914) KU Leuven
The financial and economic collapse in 2008 has increased the interest for the literary reflection on economic crises and their social consequences. This project takes this contemporary sensibility and the ways in which it is reflected in contemporary political theory as a vantage point to look back at the German social novels in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 1873. By focusing on the literary representation of the worker in his ...
The reception of Oswald Spengler in the German literary-intellectual discourse after 1989 (Reinhard Jirgl - Botho Strauß - Peter Sloterdijk). KU Leuven
The Hierarchical lexicon: a contrastive study of productivitiy and schematicity in Nominal Compounds in German, Dutch and Swedish Ghent University
The project investigates the productivity and schematicity of nominal the compounds in German, Ductch and Swedish. Lexicological and Corpus-linguistic data are used to document convergences and divergences and to draw conclusions with regard to morphologica! theory (with special reference to the theory of the 'hierarchiecal lexicon' in construction morphology), the Germanic languages, and contrastive linguistics.
U+201CA socio-literary rebirth of classical tragedy after NietzscheU+201D. A poetical receptionstudy of the social integration of a U+2018classicalU+2019 tragic condition in German literary and dramatic texts at the beginning of the 20th-c Ghent University
This project aims to investigate the reception of the material, language- and formstructures of classical tragedy in the dramatic poetical works of the German author Paul Ernst (1866-1933). As a reaction on the contemporary society and inspired by Nietzsche, he engaged his works to create an artistic and social U+2018renaissanceU+2019 of a U+2018tragic conditionU+2019.
Investigating the productivity of the alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat construction in Present-Day German and Icelandic Ghent University
This study investigates the productivity of the alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat construction in German and Icelandic. Through both a corpus study and a number of psycholinguistic experiments, we show that the verbs in question alternate between two case frames, and hence that subjecthood is constructionally determined. Preliminary (corpus) results for both languages individually show that such is indeed the case.
Propaganda, Media, Culture and Public Life under the German Occupation (1940-1945): local, national and transnational perspectives. KU Leuven
A corpus-based investigation of the dative alternation with TRANSFER verbs in the history of New High German (1650 until present) Ghent University
This project explores the motivations behind the alternation between the Dative Construction (e.g. Sie sendet dir einen Brief) and the Prepositional Construction (e.g. Er sendet den Aufsatz an den Herausgeber) with ditransitive TRANSFERverbs (geben, senden, schicken etc.) in the history of ‘New High German’ (ca. 1650 until present). The focus is on (i) the changing frequencies and forms of the alternation and on (ii) the role of different ...