Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Towards multilingual language histories: Dutch in context and contact" "Rik Vosters" "Linguistics and Literary Studies" "This research program starts from the observation that language histories, because of their focus on just one language, often ignore multilingualism and multilingual practices, while every language history is in fact just a history of contact between languages. We want to bring about a change of perspective here by using a series of case studies to focus on less obvious multilingual elements in the history of Dutch, in order to provide building blocks that can lay the foundations for a new and profoundly multilingual view of language history overall. We will thus carry out various language-historical studies on Dutch in the Southern Netherlands, in contact with other languages, and from the perspective of the speakers themselves. It is not the language an sich that interests us, but rather the use of language in a broader social and often multilingual context. The research has three main goals: (1) we want to make previously overlooked languages and their language use visible, (2) we want to broaden our view and also look at phenomena in the social or geographical margins of language history, previously considered less important but perhaps just now particularly relevant, and (3) we want to show the continuity between language use in the past and how we interact with language now, in order to better understand the present through the past and in order to gain a better understanding of language history through a view of the linguistic present. We focus for this study on individuals in particular and non-obvious multilingual contexts, considering changes over time, and paying attention to the connections between past and present. Our overarching goal is to gain new insights into language history, which may lead us to a better understanding of multilingualism in the past and today. In the longer term, this research aims to provide an example for similar studies in other language areas, where a multilingual rethinking of the concept of language history is also needed." "A study of BIYO, an endangered Chinese ethnic minority language of the Lolo-Burmese family: Language documentation and an analytical approach to the system of discourse markers in contact with Southwestern Mandarin" "Christoph Anderl" "Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication, Department of Languages and Cultures" "This project aims at documenting the endangered BIYO language (Hani group of the Lolo-Burmese language family), spoken by ethnic minorities in scattered locations of Southwestern Yunnan Province of China. Nowadays, the language is very rarely transmitted to the younger generation which prefers Chinese or English as daily meansof communication. As such, the language community is continuously shrinking and the language is on the verge of becoming extinct.The project aims at preserving BIYO and its cultural heritage, by documenting its lexicon and grammar, based on two field studies conducted in Bixi Town and Keman Village of Mojiang County. The material will be collected through audio and video recordings of dialogues and traditional genres narrated by BIYO speakers, such as myths and historical narratives, descriptions of festivals and handicrafts. In addition, we will produce video recordings of important rituals, related to nature deities and significant events in life (such as birth, naming ceremonies, funerals, etc.).The material will be transcribed and linguistically analyzed, as such creating an archive of the language, which can be used by both BIYO members and linguists. In particular, we will conduct a thorough study of the highly complex system of modal particles / discourse markers. We will try to categorize and describe them, and show how they interact and in which ways they have been influenced by Southwestern Mandarin. Our analysis of the modal system will be based on the Cartographic approach within generative grammar." "The interplay between language contact and language change in a fragmentary linguistic area: the Italic peninsula in the first millennium B.C.E." "Freek Van de Velde" "Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (QLVL), Leuven, Comparative, Historical and Applied Linguistics, Leuven" "This research project focuses on the languages spoken in the Italic peninsula in the first millennium B.C.E. (in particular, Latin, Etruscan, Oscan and Umbrian) and the insights they can provide into the process of language change. Linguists have long recognised that the spread of language innovations from one language variety to another is an integral part of all language change, but the conditions which determine whether or not an innovation spreads to neighbouring varieties are not well understood. In particular, there has been little systematic research on the effects of different degrees of relatedness and similarity between the languages involved on the diffusion of novel features between them. The Italic peninsula is an area that is of unique interest for resolving questions such as this, in that it attests a large number of languages with different degrees of relationship and typological similarity. Studying the effects of language contact in this context will allow the various predictors of language change to be systematically examined in relation to each other. In addition, the results of this research project will provide insights for future research on poorly attested languages" "Language contact between migrating Bantu speakers and resident Khoisan speakers in southern Africa" "Koen Bostoen" "Department of Languages and Cultures" "Bantu languages are Africa’s largest language family, found in virtually all areas of Africa below the equator. In southern Africa, however, small groups remain that speak languages of a very different family, the so-called “click” languages, which are referred to as Khoisan languages. These are spoken by southern Africa’s first populations, who came into contact with speakers of Bantu languages when they arrived in southern Africa some 2,000 years ago. This contact with speakers of radically different languages caused the languages of the migrating Bantu speakers to change, by adopting words, sounds, and grammatical patterns from Khoisan languages. As it is well known that the kind of language change that takes place in contact situations is determined by its social circumstances, we can study the social settings of past contact situations by looking at the linguistic traces that are preserved in the languages of today. These results from linguistics can be combined with insights from research in molecular anthropology, which studies population histories by looking at DNA of modern individuals. These have already shown that historically, men of Bantu ancestry married women with a Khoisan background, but that the integration of Khoisan men into Bantu societies was much more rare. This project will add insights from the field of linguistics to these findings, in order to understand how migrating Bantu speakers and resident Khoisan speakers interacted in southern Africa." "Language contact and linguistic reconstruction: (pre)historic Bantu-Khoisan interactions in Southern Africa in a historical linguistic perspective" "Koen Bostoen" "Department of Languages and Cultures" "The Southern African linguistic landscape is dominated by Bantu languages, which form Africa’s largest language family and are spoken by the vast majority of Southern Africans. Nonetheless, the first Bantu-speaking communities arrived in Southern Africa less than two thousand years ago, where they came into contact with and gradually replaced the languages of pre-existing hunter-gatherer and pastoralist communities, known as “Khoisan” languages. A previous FWO-funded research project revealed extensive linguistic influence from Khoisan languages in the languages of modern-day Bantu speakers, but also raised important questions about the chronology of the historical contact situations in which these arose. In this project, I will use historical linguistic methodologies such as the comparative method to investigate which Khoisan-derived linguistic features can be reconstructed to earlier stages in the development of Southern Bantu languages. This innovative combination of historical and contact linguistics will result in an understanding of the relative timing of different situations of Bantu-Khoisan language contact, which had never before been investigated. This will allow for these linguistic results to be combined with findings from archaeological and genetic research, in order to provide groundbreaking new insights into the history of Bantu-Khoisan contact in Southern Africa." "The grammaticalization of the future and conditional tense in the history of Ibero-Romance: a language and dialect contact approach" "Claudia Crocco" "Department of Linguistics" "This project aims at determining whether there is diatopic variation and a geographic spread in the grammaticalization of the Old Ibero-Romance future and conditional paradigms and assessing the role of language and dialect contact in grammatical change across the Ibero-Romance languages. This is done by means of an extensive corpus study and both quantitative and qualitative analyses." "The grammaticalisation of the future and conditional tense in the history of Ibero-Romance: a language and dialect contact approach." "Claudia Crocco, Marleen Van Peteghem" "Department of Linguistics" "The development of the future and conditional tense in Castilian – as in Romance in general – has been universally acknowledged as a typical case of grammaticalisation, whereby the two components of the Latin periphrasis [infinitive + HABERE] fused into a synthetic form (cantaré, cantaría). In Old Castilian variation between synthetic forms and analytic forms (cantar lo é, cantar lo ía) can be witnessed, which indicates that the grammaticalisation process is still ongoing. The synthetic structures eventually triumphed over the analytic ones in the Early Modern period, thereby completing the grammaticalisation process. The literature on this topic shows an important gap as the exact chronology and the geography of this development remain largely unexplored. A comparison between Castilian and its neighbour languages (Galician-Portuguese, Asturian-Leonese, Navarro-Aragonese, Catalan, Occitan) hints at a grammaticalisation continuum that covers the Iberian Peninsula and beyond. A recently formulated hypothesis proposes that the spread of the change occurred through language contact following a North-South-West route. The proposed research will examine and test this hypothesis and aim to establish the geography of the grammaticalisation process while investigating the concrete roles of grammaticalisation and language and dialect contact in this structural convergence phenomenon." "Broadening the theoretical and methodological scope of translation and interpreting studies: towards an interdisciplinary language- contact framework" "Gert De Sutter" "Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication" "Although translation and interpreting studies (TIS) is still a young academic discipline (it started to develop only around mid-20th century), it has already significantly increased our understanding of these highly specific communication practices. It has emerged, for instance, that phonological, prosodic, lexical, grammatical, pragmatic and paralinguistic properties of the languages which are co-activated in translation and interpreting may change, leading to either small, ephemeral differences when compared to the same language in a monolingual situation or bigger, structural, stable changes in language structure and language use. TIS researchers generally agree that the occurrence of these differences is related to a complex interaction of social, cognitive, technological and multimodality-related constraints. Investigations into such language-contact-induced linguistic differences and their underlying constraints are being carried out not only in TIS, but also in related (linguistic) disciplines which focus on other types of language-contact settings (e.g., settings in which language learners acquire a new, foreign language; multilingual cities and nations where different (official) languages influence each other’s structure and use). Related disciplines that have a predominant focus on linguistic phenomena in language-contact settings are (probabilistic) variational linguistics of World Englishes, learner corpus research, contrastive linguistics, psycholinguistic bilingualism research, and translation & interpreting technology. Each of these disciplines, however, has its own terminological apparatus and its preferred conceptual and methodological framework. Needless to say, research findings do not find their way easily in TIS, and even if they do, comparing research results remains difficult. As a result, TIS hardly takes advantage of other discipline’s insights. Given the large number of constraints to be taken into account, a multi-methods approach is needed with appropriate statistical testing, as well as a new conceptual framework, which builds on the insights from these related fields, in order to more adequately describe, explain and predict the linguistic make-up of the translation and interpreting act. As translation and interpreting permeates society in new and challenging ways, to a much greater extent than has ever been the case in history, understanding (and modelling) this complex reality becomes increasingly crucial for the further development of TIS. In TIS, several forces are already beginning to pull in the same direction – reflected by increased methodological awareness, better articulated theoretical underpinnings and more interdisciplinary collaboration – and consolidation of these forces could lead to major breakthroughs. This WOG therefore aims to bring together key members of the TIS community and leading scholars from the neighboring disciplines mentioned above, who have complementary methodological and theoretical expertise, and who have a keen interest in multi-methods approaches, advanced statistical testing, and theory formation. The main objective of this WOG is the improvement and exchange of scientific knowledge about the constraints that influence the nature of translated, interpreted as well as other contact varieties in our highly globalized, digitalized and multicultural world through the creation of a network of scholars. More particularly, this network will: Disseminate current knowledge about empirical studies of translation and interpreting as well as other types of language contact by creating a website that functions as a central hub for references, tutorials and video interviews with leading scholars. Develop, disseminate and promote the use of advanced research methodologies (in particular multi-method approaches and advanced statistical methods) through workshops, summer schools and short-term visits, specifically for postdoc investigators. Stimulate the creation of larger and better multilingual, context-sensitive data collections, by offering a platform (as part of the website) for collaborative corpus construction, where best practices for compilation and design, annotation guidelines and relevant metadata are shared (cf., for instance, Centre for Open Science: https://osf.io/). Integrate existing data collections and strive towards convergence of methodological designs by setting up research collaborations between members of the network and joint applications for (interdisciplinary) research projects. Stimulate the use of empirical designs that are geared to verifying, adapting and enlarging the explanatory power of existing theoretical models.   Through its objectives, the WOG will reshape the field in such a way that data sources and resources and the results of the empirical investigations are directly comparable, thereby triggering a significant knowledge leap forward in our understanding of language variation in translation and interpreting as well as other contact-induced communication settings. The central dissemination channel will be the WOG’s website, which will include a publicly available list of important publications, video tutorials and interviews, as well as technical reports on corpus compilation and multi-methods designs. In addition to the website, the following activities are planned, aiming at dissemination of the WOG’s results, stimulating joint publications and (interdisciplinary) project proposals, and fostering collaboration across research units and disciplines: One workshop in the second, third and fourth years; these will be devoted to the use of advanced methodological and analytical tools to adequately grasp the nature of contact-induced communicative acts, using an elaborate theoretical framework. If possible, the workshops will be held back-to-back with international conferences such as EST or TiT (in the form of panels or pre-conference workshops). International experts will be invited to participate as speakers and reviewers, to assess the standard of the WOG’s work and anchor it in the scientific community. Scientific publications, especially in open-access journals / volumes (such as Language Science Press): technical papers on corpus compilation and annotation, multivariate statistics and combining product and process studies. Closing international workshop in the fifth year, both for WOG’s participants and other scholars: highlighting the achievements of the WOG; offering a forum for scholars who conducted research along the methodological, analytical or theoretical lines set out in the WOG, and stimulating the preparation of a joint Horizon Europe application." "OZR Backup mandate: Is CLIL beneficial for everyone? Exploring the effectiveness of Content and Language Integrated Learning in heterogeneous language contexts present in Flemish Community schools in Brussels." "Brussels Centre for Language Studies" "Over the last 25 years, Content and Language Integrated Learning(CLIL) has gained ever-increasing popularity in European educationcontexts. The benefits of CLIL programs are therefore welldocumented. Although the extent may vary depending on theresearch context, CLIL often results in greater proficiency in theprogram’s Target Language (TL), with few to no drawbacks in termsof the learners’ mother tongue proficiency. However, the necessityand value of this project stem from the lack of diversity included inprevious CLIL studies in terms of participants, linguistic context, aswell as TL. The novelty of this project thus resides in theconsideration of pupils with a heterogeneous language background(i.e. French and heritage language speakers), a heterogeneousresearch context (i.e. Flemish Community schools in the bilingualregion of Brussels) and French as a TL. All the learners will beexamined based on their oral and writing proficiency in both TL andmother tongue by conducting spontaneous language productiontasks. These productions will then be subjected to statistical analysesby using Structural equation modeling (SEM). The results I aim toobtain within this project will provide new insights into theeffectiveness of CLIL for underinvestigated profiles of learners aswell as societal contexts." "II International CROS Conference 2024: ""Crossing the Borders: Spanish and other Languages and Literatures in Contact""." "Diana Castilleja" "Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings, Linguistics and Literary Studies, Brussels Platform for Digital Humanities, Brussels Centre for Urban Studies" "This second congress proposes to analyze the contact situations where Spanish enters into cross-fertilization with English and other languages and cultures, as it would be for example in Spain (Basque, Catalan, and Galician and other European languages such as French and Portuguese); in Mexico (Nahuatl and Maya); in Central and South America (Quechua, Aymara, Maya, and Guarani); in the extreme South of Latin America (Portuguese, Italian, and German); in the Caribbean and the Philippines (the creole languages); in the United States (English). Contributions from different fields, such as linguistics, literature, cultural studies, translation, language acquisition and migratory movements, will be focused on three main topics: 1. Spanish in contact with other languages. 2. ELE [SFL]: Learning and interlinguistic pragmatics 3. Migratory movements and identity (re)construction"