Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "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." "Project Research Fund Autonomous Community Madrid and European Social Fund: ""The migrant population of the Autonomous Community of Madrid: linguistic, communicative, cultural and social factors of the integration process and linguistic intervention re" "Kris Buyse" "Leuven Language Institute (ILT)" "Within this project (funding by the Research Fund of the Autonomous Commnity of Madrid (H2019/HUM-5772 INMIGRA3-CM; Comunidad de Madrid. Plan Regional de Investigación PROGRAMAS DE I+D EN CCSS Y HUMANIDADES cofinanciado con Fondo Social Europeo; PI: Susana Martín Leralta (Universidad Nebrija); budget: 17.681€) we investigate the impact of linguistic, communicative, cultural and social factors on migrant integration in Madrid and which linguistic tools can foster this process. " "Functional and Cognitive Linguistics (grammar and typology)." "Peter Petré" "Grammar and Pragmatics" "Understanding how, when, and why do the functions and forms of grammar change the way they do, in order to gain insight in human cognition and evolution. The fundamental questions that continue to guide this research are: 1. To what extent is language change dependent on linguistic variation between individuals? For a long time studies on language change treated language as an abstract object cut loose from its users. But obviously language cannot exist without them. While sociolinguists have paid attention to variation between speakers based on social variables (such as age, gender, class), the individual matter less to them, as it is bound to align itself to its peers. Such a view is problematic in view of recent theories that consider language to function as a complex adaptive system, not only at the aggregate level (being an emergent property of the interaction of multiple agents), but also at the level of the individuals themselves. Since language is learnt based on input, which is unique to every individual, different individuals are expected to make different (linguistic) abstractions and generalizations. Cognitive learning styles appear not to be identical either. People do not always share linguistic generalizations even if belonging to the same community. One objective is to shed light on how this cognitive variation feeds into language at the community level. 2. To which degree do individuals change their syntactic behavior across their lifespans? This second question relates to the role of cognitive aging in syntactic change. Two conflicting views have dominated this debate. Research embedded in the generative tradition takes syntactic structures to crystallize into a stable state in early childhood. Proponents of this view typically consider children as the primary instigators of change. Conversely, usage-based/constructionist approaches attribute a central role to language use in both the acquisition process and in language change. Linguistic change is considered to originate in speaker interaction. Speakers may adopt novel constructions both in childhood and later in life, where the second option is the most likely for constructions with complex pragmatic features (such as the grammaticalization of epistemic meaning). From earlier research it appeared that both qualitative and quantitative grammatical change in adult life is attested, but at the same time limited by entrenched use as well as social inhibition. A full understanding of change will have to involve both generational incrementation and lifespan change. 3. To what degree do changes in different constructions affect each other, also at the individual level? During much of its history English has drifted towards a stricter SOV word order, and much more so than other Germanic languages. One effect of this is that the subject slot expanded to host a greater variety of subject types, including for instance a higher rate of inanimate subjects (rather than prototypical agent-subjects). My ERC project investigated the evidence that individuals are perceptive of large-scale shifts like this, and whether their grammars show lifespan developments that feed into them. For example, it appears that there has been an increase of inanimate subjects in progressive constructions. Do individuals, then, who participate in this increase, also partici¬pate in the increase of inanimate subjects in other constructions? Or are individuals unaware of these large-scale emergent properties? Turns out individuals do associate closely related constructions in their minds. However, it has so far been impossible to find conclusive evidence for the idea that such constructions also coevolve across the lifespan. While lack of data is partly to blame, there are indicat¬ions that this type of longer-term coevolution is out of the purview of individual language users and is rather an emergent effect, as is common in complex adaptive systems. The issue will be further investigated." "BOF ZAP linguistics" "Sara Pacchiarotti" "Department of Languages and Cultures" "A professorship granted by the Special Research Fund is a primarily research-oriented position and is made available for excellent researchers with a high-quality research programme." "THE AUTHORSHIP AND CONTRIBUTION OF INDONESIAN SCHOLARS IN ARABIC LINGUISTICS STUDIES (Case Study of Muhammad Nawawi al-Bantani)" "Umar Ryad" "Arabic Studies, Leuven" "This research proposal seeks to address the scholarly oversight of Muhammad Nawawi al-Bantani's contributions to the field of Arabic linguistics. Despite his prolific works in various areas of Islamic studies, al-Bantani's expertise in Arabic linguistics has received insufficient attention. Therefore, this study aims to rectify this scholarly neglect by conducting a comprehensive analysis of al-Bantani's writings on Arabic syntax, morphology, and rhetoric. By scrutinizing his ideas and insights, the research endeavors to illuminate their significance within the realm of Arabic studies in Indonesia and the wider Malay world. The research methodology employs a philological approach, encompassing the meticulous selection and compilation of relevant data from al-Bantani's works, followed by content analysis. Furthermore, a comparative analysis will be conducted, drawing parallels between al-Bantani's contributions and those of other Malay Muslim scholars in order to construct a comprehensive historiography of Arabic studies in the region. Ultimately, this research aims to fill the scholarly gap by offering a nuanced understanding of al-Bantani's scholarly contributions to the field of Arabic linguistics and their broader impact." "IOF Valorisation Manager Applied Linguistics" "Kris Peeters" "Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies (TricS)" "The valorisation manager facilitates the growth of research and valorisation potential in the Department of Applied Linguistics / Translation and Interpreting by, among other things: (i) stimulating co-operation with industry and cultural stakeholders, and building a network with private and public sector partners; (ii) mapping, describing and protecting a knowledge and IP portfolio of potential interest to industry. (iii) proactively exploring new opportunities for collaboration and valorisation with a specific focus on the impact of rapidly evolving technology on new research and valorisation opportunities in Translation and Interpreting Studies; (iv) facilitating the process of identifying valorisation partners, defining projects and closing agreements." "BOF-ZAP professorship in formal and historical linguistics" "Alexandra Simonenko" "Department of Linguistics" "A BOF-ZAP professorship granted by the Special Research Fund is a primarily research-oriented position and is made available for excellent researchers with a high-quality research programme." "Recasting Transformer-based Language Models as a Tool for Analysis in both Linguistics and Other Fields with Text-driven Methodologies" "Tim Van de Cruys" "Linguistics Research Unit, Leuven, Faculty of Arts, Brussels Campus" "Recent machine learning methods based on neural transformer architectures have greatly improved the state of the art for a wide range of natural language processing applications, such as machine translation and general natural language understanding. There is evidence that the self-supervised language modeling objective on which such neural methods are trained results in models that implicitly encode various kinds of linguistic knowledge, ranging from part-of-speech information to syntactic structure to co-reference information. The main research aim is to dissect, adapt, and exploit transformer architectures in order to investigate to which extent such implict linguistic representations can used as a means for exploring and analyzing linguistic phenomena. Additionally, in the context of the CLARIAH-VL work package SIC 5 (Digital Text Analysis Dashboard and Pipeline), the real-life utility of our insights will be tested through concrete implementation in a series of applications within the field of digital humanities." "BOF-ZAP professorship in Greek linguistics" "Andrea Cuomo" "Department of Linguistics" "A professorship granted by the Special Research Fund is a primarily research-oriented position and is made available for excellent researchers with a high-quality research programme." """Languages writing history: the impact of language studies beyond linguistics (1700-1860)""" "Toon Van Hal" "Comparative, Historical and Applied Linguistics, Leuven, Faculty of Arts" "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 many of his contemporaries, languages had 'written history'. More generally, during the early modern period, languages were studied in many different contexts besides simply language description and language acquisition. Before language study became institutionalized, and concentrated, in the discipline of linguistics in the 19th century, languages were central to understanding mankind and, thus, to the making of the humanities. This project aims to (1) measure the impact of the broadening of the linguistic scope on the study of the humanities in general, (2) map the ways and strategies through which (a) the instrumental study of languages evolved into linguistics as an independent discipline and (b) linguistic arguments continued to play a vital role in adjacent branches of learning. In this connection, we will also (3) examine what 'got lost' in the process of turning linguistics into a discipline, or else, what now required a trade-off between different fields of specialized expertise."