Projects

The proposed research will shed new light on a debate within Bantu, the largest language family in Africa and a recent offshoot of Niger-Congo, the worldU+2019s largest phylum. Many non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages have an analytical morphosyntactic profile, while a great majority of Bantu languages have an agglutinative profile, which was also reconstructed for Proto-Bantu. The controversy revolves around which of these two profiles is ...

Before the study of language was institutionalized, and concentrated, in the discipline of linguistics in the 19th century, languages were central to understanding mankind and, therefore, to scholarship in the humanities. Once historical and linguistic knowledge came to be collected, systematized, categorized, codified, and transmitted in institutionalized disciplines, boundaries arose between the new disciplines. This project aims to focus ...

Although “difference” as an undefined, almost intuitive concept has played a role in linguistic thought and practice from the early beginnings, it was only in the 20th century that a “technical”, operational concept of fundamental axiomatic importance for linguistic description was formulated and argued for in terms of “differential” and “oppositional” relationship. The Cours of F. de Saussure (1916) systematizes this concept, specifically in ...

The aim of this PhD project is to advance the corpus-linguistic study of the Greek papyri, a large diachronic corpus (3rd century BC – 8th century AD) of non-literary Greek. It consists of two central parts. The first part is focused on corpus design: starting from the transcribed (XML) version of these texts, it describes a pipeline model to supply the papyri step for step with linguistic information, using natural language ...

The proposed project aims to determine the origins and diachronic development of U+201Cgenitive of negationU+201D (GenNeg) in Germanic, and to evaluate its relationship with GenNeg as found in Balto-Slavic and Balto-Finnic languages from a historical, and typological viewpoint. GenNeg is a morphosyntactic phenomenon whereby the argument (subject/direct object) of a verb is assigned the genitive/partitive case under negation. This phenomenon ...

This project concerns the development of a historical dialect database of the Flemish dialects for studying dialect syntax. The concerned dataset is part of the oldest orally surveyed dialect collection in the language area. Between 1923 and 1982, speakers of 1956 locations of the Dutch and Frisian language translated 141 sentences into their local dialects. They were written down in phonetic writing by trained linguists and published in ...