Projects
Contrastive linguistics: applied and theoretical (CLAT). KU Leuven
Sabbatical Heidi Verplaetse: Applied study of modality in science/health communication and advisory texts, and linguistic focus points in translation assessment KU Leuven
During the sabbatical period, I plan to continue the line of research I have developed over recent years regarding translation quality based on error analyzes of student translations. Specifically, I aim to explore and add linguistic focus points for error analysis. I would also like to elaborate preparations for research into translation processes among students. Interdisciplinary points of contact with colleagues between research into ...
The concept of functional opposition in general linguistics, 1916-1966: methodological status and technicaldescriptive relevance. KU Leuven
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 ...
Corpus linguistics in the Greek papyri: developing a corpus to study variation and change in the post-classical Greek complementation system KU Leuven
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 ...
Languages writing history. The impact of language studies beyond linguistics (1700-1860) KU Leuven
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 ...
"Languages writing history: the impact of language studies beyond linguistics (1700-1860)" KU Leuven
In 1710, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz noted that “languages will serve as monuments in our investigations since the peoples’ origins reach further back than history’s tradition can tell.' In his opinion, the study of language, and language comparison in particular, was the historian’s foremost source of knowledge about the earliest stages of humanity as well as its migrations (see Van Hal 2014 and other contributions in Li 2014). For him, as for ...
Early Western Analyses of the Languages of Central Asia and India: Tradition and Renewal in Missionary Linguistics KU Leuven
From the 16th century onwards, European missionaries documented and described numerous non−European languages (many of which are now extinct or on the verge of extinction). Concentrating on the analysis of Central−Asian and Indian languages by 17th− and 18th−century missionaries, the present project seeks to chart the missionaries' attitudes towards unfamiliar, non−European languages and their views on theoretical issues such as linguistic ...