Projects
Visual Downtoning. A systematic comparison of downtoning patterns in German co-speech gesture and in German Sign Language. KU Leuven
In language studies, the term 'downtoning' is used for the expression of subtle nuances which can be added to an utterance without changing its truth value, in that they indicate, for instance, the speaker's view on the content of the utterance, or give an indication about which reaction the speaker expects from the hearer. Previous research on German downtoning particles (a particular kind of marker of downtoning) has shown that when people ...
Legal culture and language: a study of the linguisticdiscursive aspects of contract law in France, Germany and England from a comparative and historical perspective Ghent University
Comparative law has always been a kind of umbrella concept encompassing different
activities with diverse underlying motives and goals and to that extent, methodological
pluralism is part and parcel of comparative law. In the context of approximation/harmonization initiatives (e.g. EU), scholars in comparative contract law have tended to adopt a (not well elaborated) functionalist approach and limited their research to a mainly ...
Cleft constructions Romance and Germanic (non-standard) linguistic varieties Ghent University
In this research I will contribute to one of the major issues in the Gnerative approach, namely how much the interpretive component syntactically encoded. In order to do this, I will analyze the cleft structures of some Romance and Germanci languages with different main characteristics, with special attention for non-standard varieties of French, Dutch and European Portuguese.
Intercultural competence: the role of modal particlesith regard to the acquisition of German formal and informal language use. Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Little Words in Early Germanic Ghent University
This project will establish the phonological status of ‘little words’ – clitics and clitic-like elements – in the early Germanic languages by combining insights from theoretical prosodic linguistics and advances in descriptive Germanic philology. Using evidence from the metres of alliterative verse, combined with non-metrical evidence from orthographic accent marks and linguistic developments, I will examine clitics in several early Germanic ...
Population developments co-determine diffusional language change: a close-up view on West-Germanic languages KU Leuven
This project investigates the relation between urban population developments and morphological changes in three major West-Germanic languages, English, Dutch, German, from the beginning of Early Modernity to the end of Classical Modernity (1500-1900). The main hypothesis is that morphological simplification accelerates when urban populations grow. Put more succinctly: word structure becomes simpler when cities grow. The reason is that the ...
The variability of ergativity in the Indo-Aryan languages of the South-Asian sub¬continent. A typological study of the ergative patterning of Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Assamese, Nepali, Marathi, Marwari, Sindhi, Punjabi and Gujarati. Ghent University
This typological study of various Indo-Aryan languages comprises two objectives: i) to elucidate, by means of a synchronic comparison, the diachronic problem of the disappearance or degeneration of the ergative construction in split ergative languages ii) to offer an empirical grounding for a better understanding of the phenomenon of ergativity and to offer an attempt to a general definition of it.
Multilingualism, translation and minor languages in contemporary world literature KU Leuven
Since its emergence in the 18th century, monolingualism has had a strong impact on literature and culture. Despite its avowed global perspective, world literature still leans towards monolingualism. Not only does it focus on writers who write in major languages, while peripheral regions and minor languages are off the map, but it also favours monolingual works. Multilingual texts are often considered untranslatable or incomprehensible, which ...