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English phrases, French verbs: Causes and consequences of loan word accommodation biases KU Leuven
When loan words enter their recipient language, they accommodate to the structure and paradigms of that language. The most common accommodation strategy cross‑linguistically is 'direct insertion', where recipient‑language inflections can be added directly to the loan verb stem. However, this PhD project has shown that - even under direct insertion - loan words can be biased towards specific inflectional and grammatical categories, and we have ...
A corpus-based study of the prosody and information structure of English it-clefts and French c'est-clefts. KU Leuven
In English and French, clefts are a productive resource serving information structural purposes, which makes them a particularly useful device to fulfil specific communicative and rhetorical goals. This study investigates the use of cleft constructions in the two languages, first in their own right and then contrastively. Using data from comparable corpora of spontaneous dialogues, I show that clefts display a wider variation in their ...
Prepositional phrase complements to English mental adjectives: Variation and Change KU Leuven
English mental adjectives (e.g., aware, angry, happy, sure, surprised, etc.) can have their complements marked by a variety of prepositions. For example, angry can combine with prepositional phrase complements (PPCs) headed by about, at, or with, as well as for and over, all potentially marking the external source of the anger. PPCs to English mental adjectives have not been heavily researched. Adopting both the synchronic and diachronic ...
Dynamic, deontic and evaluative adjectives and their clausal complement patterns: A synchronic-diachronic account KU Leuven
Dynamische, deontische en evaluatieve adjectieven en hun patronen van zi nscomplementatie: een synchroon-diachrone benadering An Van linden K.U. Leuven Deze dissertatie bestudeert de patronen van zinscomplementatie bij adjec tieven die niet-epistemische betekenissen uitdrukken, vanuit een synchro on en diachroon perspectief. Ze spitst zich toe op adjectieven, omdat de bestaande literatuur over complementatie en modaliteit tot dusver veel meer ...
English specificational and predicative clauses: A functional-cognitive account of their representational and textual organisation KU Leuven
Specificational clauses set up a pragmatically presupposed variable - i.e. that is presumed to be known or to be taken for granted by the hearer (Lambrecht 1994: 52) -, e.g. the best option in (1a), and assign a specific value to it, e.g. the Hotel Boomerang. (1a) Where to stay: the Parador El Hierro … has doubles from £80 a night, B&B. Or in Valverde, the best option [variable] is *the Hotel Boomerang* [value]. (WB) The role of such a ...
English Text Construction KU Leuven
Categoriality in language change: the case of the English gerund KU Leuven
This study aims to provide a more accurate understanding of the changing relations between the structural make-up and the functional-semantic profile of the various constructions which the English gerundive system comprises. The present-day gerundive system is made up of two major subtypes: the ‘nominal gerund’, which structurally resembles the class of nominals (1), and the ‘verbal gerund’, which has the internal structure of a non-finite ...
A brief history of English syntax KU Leuven
© Olga Fischer, Hendrik De Smet and Wim van der Wurff 2017. All rights reserved. In its 1500-year history, the English language has seen dramatic grammatical changes. This book offers a comprehensive and reader-friendly account of the major developments, including changes in word order, the noun phrase and verb phrase, changing relations between clausal constituents and the development of new subordinate constructions. The book puts forward ...
How gradual change progresses: The interaction between convention and innovation KU Leuven
© 2016 Cambridge University Press. This paper hypothesizes that as an expression becomes more frequent in one grammatical context, its mental retrievability improves, which in turn makes it more easily available in different yet closely related (analogous) grammatical contexts. Such a mechanism can account for the progression of gradual change. The hypothesis generates two testable predictions. First, innovative constructions should be more ...