Projects
Language change, cultural change? Social deixis through nominal and pronominal address in the history of English KU Leuven
Address terms constitute a core resource for realizing social deixis. Because of address terms' prominent social function, changes in address systems are often attributed to cultural changes (e.g. recent changes in address between children and parents may reflect changing parent-child relationships). However, these explanations have rarely been tested on a systematic basis. Cultural explanations of changes in address usage are most convincing ...
Towards a diachronic typology of the middle voice KU Leuven
The middle voice is a complex linguistic domain, as it lies at the interface between morphosyntax and the structure of the lexicon. A typical example of a middle marking language is Dutch, in which the ‘reflexive’ pronoun zich in fact behaves as a middle marker, as it is used either lexically with verbs that only occur with the reflexive, e.g. zich vergissen ‘be mistaken’, or to derive reflexives from transitive verbs, e.g. zich(zelf) slaan ...
Bystanders no more: simple forms and the expression of aspect in the history of English and beyond KU Leuven
contrast to other Germanic languages, Present-day English systematically marks progressive aspect, using BE Ving (e.g. ‘we are eating’). In this, English now behaves typologically as an unbounded language. While BE Ving and its recent rise and grammaticalization have attracted much attention in the literature, little is known about other means of expressing progressive aspect in English, and how the rise of BE Ving affected these. These ...
Insurbordination in the deontic domain: a semantic and constructional typology. KU Leuven
Complexity in complementation: understanding long-term change in verb complementation in terms of inter- and intra-individual variation. University of Antwerp
Morpho-syntactic variation in the Greek documentary papyri (III BC – VI AD). A socio-historical investigation Ghent University
This investigation studies the relationship that exists between certain linguistic (morpho-syntactic) and social characteristics, and how this relationship evolves through time. The corpus consists of Greek ‘documentary’ papyri, with an emphasis on three general text types, that is, ‘letters’, ‘contracts’ and ‘petitions’. Theoretically, the investigation is embedded in the ‘Systemic Functional’ framework.
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Providing fundamental neurophysiological language-markers by addressing Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) Ghent University
Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a progressive form of dementia characterized by the global
loss of language abilities and initial preservation of other cognitive functions. Three variants of PPA
–logopenic, semantic, and non-fluent/agrammatic –have been concluded in consensus by an
international group of researchers (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2011). However, this classification is
mainly based on ...
The Expression of Mitigation in Spanish-English Codeswitching Contexts. A Multifactorial and Multimethod Account. Ghent University
This project wants to contribute to a better understanding of the grammar underlying Spanish-English codeswitching phenomena. In concrete, it looks into the factors governing an overlooked but highly productive construction in codeswitching contexts, namely mitigation structures. These express quantitative or qualitative reduction of a base form, as in a little casa or the casita (‘the small house’). The construction is very differently ...
Transitivity oppositions in a diachronic typological perspective: Labile Verbs in the history of the Indo-European languages Ghent University
Many linguists believe that the language of our Indo-European ancestors had a considerable number of verbs which may appear both in intransitive and transitive constructions with no formal change in the verb, as in the case of English "The door opened" ~ "John opened the door" or Dutch "De sleutel draait in het slot" ("The key turns in the lock") ~ "Jan draait de sleutel in het slot" ("John turns the key in the lock"). Such verbs are called ...