Titel Deelnemers "Korte inhoud" "Skills as stepping stones for employability: Perception research into the skills of Humanities students" "Melina De Dijn, Catho Jacobs, Eline Zenner, Liesbet Heyvaert" "OECD reports a mismatch between field of study and job content for Humanities students, while at the same time signalling labour market shortages for skills that seem clearly linked with the Humanities, e.g. delivering information. In order to investigate which skills Humanities students associate with their university studies, we conducted a survey among 1306 European Humanities and 231 non-Humanities students. The survey asked these students whether they felt they acquired skills during their Humanities university education which were identified in a pilot phase. The students’ answers were analysed quantitatively, arriving at a Humanities self-perception skills profile of 70 detailed descriptions of skills that fall under six clusters. We argue that this profile could be a crucial step to improve the employability of Humanities students, as students’ perceptions of their skills greatly determine the quality of transition to the labour market." "Mapping and explaining the second language gender gap across skills, countries and languages" "Katrijn Denies, Liesbet Heyvaert, Jonas Dockx, Rianne Janssen" "Categoriality in the English Gerund System" "Charlotte Maekelberghe, Liesbet Heyvaert" "Nominal and verbal gerunds in Present-day English: Aspectual features and nominal status" "Liesbet Heyvaert, Charlotte Maekelberghe, Anouk Buyle" "In this paper we want to add to the comparative description of Present-day English nominal and verbal gerundive nominalizations, by presenting the results of a quantitative, corpus-based analysis of their aspectual features. It will be shown that, in general, the claim that gerunds designate unbounded activities or activities that are in progress cannot be upheld – because a significant number of both nominal and verbal gerunds denote non-durative situations (achievements, semelfactives) or telic ones (accomplishments), and because most gerunds lack explicit markers of ‘completeness’ or ‘ongoingness’. As regards the distinction between nominal and verbal gerunds, it will be shown that nominal gerunds are attested significantly more often with activities and are more often explicitly marked for temporal bounding or for ongoingness, whereas, compared to nominal gerunds, verbal gerunds represent significantly more often achievements or semelfactives and they are more often than nominal gerunds neutral or unmarked in terms of temporal bounding. These findings are shown to tie in with a number of recent functional-semantic accounts of the English gerund and shed new light on the categorial gradience between nominal and verbal gerunds." "Categorial shift: From description to theory and back again" "Liesbet Heyvaert, Hubert Cuyckens" "Hoe digital zijn de humanities-opleidingen? Een perceptiestudie aan de faculteit Letteren van KU Leuven" "Melina De Dijn, Eline Zenner, Stefano De Pascale, Liesbet Heyvaert" "Met het project dat in dit artikel wordt toegelicht, wensen we op drie manieren bij te dragen aan het debat over digital humanities. Op het empirische niveau willen we het profiel van de Letterenfaculteit van KU Leuven blootleggen zoals dat door studenten van de verschillende opleidingen wordt gepercipieerd: op welke vaardigheden zetten opleidingen volgens studenten het meeste in, en welke plaats krijgt het adjectief digital in hun kijk op de humanities? Om deze vragen te beantwoorden, hanteren we een bottom-up mixed-method-aanpak waar technieken gerelateerd aan digital humanities concreet worden ingezet, wat meteen onze methodologische bijdrage vormt. Met name verwerken we de input van een free response-vragenlijst via word space models (Turney & Pantel 2010; Lenci 2018). De clusters die uit die NLP-analyse komen dienen vervolgens zelf als input voor het opstellen van een meer gesloten competentielijst waarbij zeven profielcomponenten voor de faculteit Letteren aan 850 studenten (waarvan ongeveer 50% van faculteit Letteren, 50% van twee controlegroepen aan de universiteit) worden voorgelegd aan de hand van 91 competenties. Uit de resultaten komt een duidelijk humanistisch profiel naar voor, met vaardigheden die gevat kunnen worden onder profielcomponenten als “maatschappij, historisch bewustzijn en culturele relativiteit” en “openheid, nuance en multiperspectiviteit”. Een opvallende afwezige is de digitale component. Toch komt net die component herhaaldelijk terug in antwoorden van alumni, (900, waarvan ongeveer 60% van de faculteit Letteren) wanneer ze bij dezelfde competentielijst moeten aanstippen welke competenties ze vaak nodig hebben op de werkvloer, maar niet aangeleerd kregen tijdens de opleiding. Als beleidsmatige bijdrage zullen we tot slot stilstaan bij de verschillende manieren waarop opleidingen in de humane wetenschappen met de aangetroffen lacune kunnen omgaan. We vergelijken een hypostatische aanpak (waar het digitale in specifieke opleidingsonderdelen wordt aangeboden), met een infusie-aanpak (waar het digitale doorheen OPO’s in het curriculum wordt verweven) en een status quo (waarin het digitale niet meer of minder wordt aangeboden dan dat nu in de curricula het geval is). Onze observaties en overwegingen zullen worden gekoppeld aan de literatuur over de zogeheten crisis van de humane wetenschappen (bv. Heiland & Huber 2014)." "Category change in the English gerund: tangled web or fine-tuned constructional network?" "Lauren Fonteyn, Liesbet Heyvaert" "© 2018 John Benjamins Publishing Company. This study considers the diachronic categorial shift from nominal (NG) to verbal gerunds (VG) in Middle English in terms of Langacker's functional account of noun phrases and clauses as 'deictic expressions'. The analysis shows that the Middle English gerund was essentially formally nominal but functionally hybrid, thus exhibiting 'form-function friction'. This friction furthered a split in the gerundive system between a verbal component associated with clausal deixis, alongside a nominal component, which specialized in nominal deixis; but this split is not absolute. The constructionist idea of language as a network of (inter) paradigmatically connected constructions helps to explain why the verbal gerund seems to simultaneously drift away from and again partake in the deictic behaviour of the nominal category." "Explorations in English Historical Syntax Foreword" "Hubert Cuyckens, Liesbet Heyvaert, Charlotte Maekelberghe" "Indefinite nominal gerunds, or the particularization of a reified event" "Charlotte Maekelberghe, Liesbet Heyvaert" "© 2016 Taylor & Francis. ABSTRACT: This paper focuses on nominal gerunds that combine verb-like semantics with the use of an indefinite article, as in Such reflection enables [a sharing of understandings]. The indefinite article in constructions like these is at first sight irreconcilable with the uncount status of the nominal gerund, and this gerund type has therefore tended to be either neglected or reduced to fully lexicalized (count) nouns. We argue that the use of the indefinite article is functionally motivated but cannot be captured in traditional referential categories, indefinite nominal gerunds being either specific, non-specific or generic and locating their referents in spatio-temporal, virtual or generic space. Instead, it is suggested, indefinite nominal gerunds impose a more schematic type of conceptualization on the event that is reified, that is they conceptualize it as a delineated event. The “particularized”, well-delineated event that indefinite nominal gerunds profile, it is shown, is either viewed directly, as a second-order entity, or the perspective that is taken is third-order, conceptualizing the event as an “idea”, “problem” or so forth. The delineation imposed by the indefinite article can be contextually supported by the syntactic function assumed by the indefinite nominal gerund, and/or through the use of lexical items." "Learner motivation in a French L2 context: Teacher motivational practices and student attitudes in relation to proficiency" "Katrijn Denies, Ilse Magnus, Piet Desmet, Sarah Gielen, Liesbet Heyvaert, Rianne Janssen"