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Researcher

Astrid De Wit

  • Research Expertise:I am a cognitive linguist with a keen interest in the semantics of grammatical constructions, primarily within the domain of tense, aspect and modality. Why, for instance, do speakers of Dutch prefer to say "Zit niet zo te zeuren" rather than "Zeur niet"? Or how come McDonald's chose "I'm loving it" as a slogan rather than "I love it"? What do these observations reveal about the function of language as a social and communicative toolkit? What is their cross-linguistic relevance? And in what way do our grammatical choices reflect general cognitive principles? In order to address these questions, I study natural-language data from a variety of languages, including (varieties of) English, Dutch, French and Slavic languages, both from a contemporary and a historical perspective. I model my analyses within a cognitive-semantic and cross-linguistically informed theoretical framework.
  • Keywords:ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, TENSE AND ASPECT, GENERAL LINGUISTICS, Language and literature (incl. information, documentation, library and archive sciences)
  • Disciplines:Contrastive linguistics, Corpus linguistics, Grammar, Linguistic typology, Semantics, Theoretical linguistics
  • Research techniques:Corpus linguistics Native speaker surveys Fieldwork
  • Users of research expertise:Students Language teachers Researchers