Projects
Is leuk sufficiently cool? The social meaning of English loanwords: an acquisitional perspective KU Leuven
This project wants to investigate how the speech community of tomorrow, viz. elementary school children evaluate the use of English words in a Dutch context, which contextual parameters affect their evaluation and whether an evolution is visible in the dimensions shaping these attitudes as children grow older. By focusing on these questions, the project I am proposing intents to break new ground in the study of social meaning of English ...
Prestige as explanatory factor for borrowability: A Cognitive Contact Linguistic approach. KU Leuven
"But they could not read the writing": The Biblical Aramaic consonantal text, its reading tradition and their mutual interaction KU Leuven
Around one percent of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is written in a language that is closely related to Hebrew, known as Biblical Aramaic. Recent research has shown that Biblical Aramaic is not a single language, but a hybrid of at least two varieties of Aramaic. This project will make a state-of-the-art linguistic description of the language varieties making up Biblical Aramaic and investigate how they influenced each other. This will ...
Exploring the dialectic relation between narrative and context from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective: The case of World War II-testimonies KU Leuven
This project scrutinizes the relation between the way narrators construct their stories and identities in relation to the dominant discourses circulating in the global context. Only recently have interactional sociolinguists increasingly examined this dialectic relation between the local interactional level of narrative and the surrounding socio-cultural context and its ‘big D’-discourses (Gee 1999). This is also thanks to positioning ...
Latin authority and constructional transparency at work: neologisms in the French medical vocabulary of the Middle Ages and their fate. KU Leuven
Concept features and lexical diversity. A dialectological case study on the relationship between meaning and variation KU Leuven
This dissertation focuses on lexical diversity, the amount of lexical variation that a concept shows, in the dialects of Dutch. Lexical diversity can differ between concepts. For the concept 'drunk', for instance, nearly 3000 English expressions exist, including blitzed, intoxicated, hammered and I’m not as think as you drunk I am (Dickson 2009, cited in Lillo 2009). For the concept 'sober', however, a ...