Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "In search of the Analytical Resultative Construction. A microtypological comparison of Romance and Germanic languages." "Peter Lauwers" "Department of Linguistics" "This project is looking for (traces of) the resultative verbal construction (Ed hammers the metal flat) in 3 Romance (French, Spanish, Romanian) and 1 German (Dutch) language, in order to capture the microtypological variation w.r.t. lexical scope and productivity of the construction, against the background of other typological properties of these languages." "Form, meaning and information structure. A systematic construction-based analysis of copular constructions in French." "Ludo Melis" "Comparative, Historical and Applied Linguistics, Leuven" "The aim of this research project is to offer a systematic, multidimensional and usage-based analysis of copular constructions in contemporary French, focusing on the so-called ""non-predicational"" sentences. Copular constructions are constructions with a non-verbal predicate (adj.; NP, ...), called predicative complement (= PC), that are linked to the subject with a copula (être) or a semi-copula (e.g. devenir). This particular type of predication and, more specifically, its relation with the different sentence types in which it appears (as illustrated in section 2.), does not only pose serious descriptive challenges, but it also raises fundamental theoretical questions on the nature of (sentence) grammar. We will argue that an account based on a comprehensive hierarchical network of constructions linked to prototype effects within the framework of Construction Grammar (henceforth CxG) is the most workable solution." "The grammaticalization of constructions with taxonomic nouns in Polish and Russian: Between prepositional phrase and genitive" "Anna Kisiel" "Functional and Cognitive Linguistics: Grammar and Typology (FunC), Brussels Campus" "The project examines the paths of change of constructions with taxonomic nouns (TNs) in two Slavic languages, Polish and Russian, in diachronic and synchronic corpora. We propose that their grammaticalization, and the resulting synchronic layering, involve a prepositional (Pol.' w rodzaju', Rus. 'po tipu') and a case-driven (Pol. 'pokroju', Rus. 'tipa') path. By introducing into the ongoing debates about TN-constructions two languages structurally different from the extensively studied Germanic and Romance languages, we reveal new evidence for identifying grammaticalization as gradual structural and collocational process. Non-representational uses, e.g. Pol. hesitation marker 'typu' or Rus. hedge 'svoego roda' are of particular interest as they appear at the stage when the grammaticalization path becomes the most divergent between the languages." "Contact-related constructional change in Dutch argument structure constructions" "Timothy Colleman" "Department of Linguistics" "The project investigates the pathways and theoretical implications of contact-related change in the formal and semantic properties of schematic grammatical constructions and/or in their frequency of use. The empirical focus is on selected argument structure constructions from 19th Century Belgian Dutch (contact language: French) and from present-day Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch (contact language: English)." "A semantic typology of present-tense constructions." "Astrid De Wit" "Grammar and Pragmatics" "The default function of a present-tense construction would appear to be locating situations at the time of speaking. Yet language-specific and contrastive research has demonstrated that, in various languages, the present tense turns out to do anything but evoke the time of speaking when it combines with event verbs. This phenomenon, called the ""present perfective paradox"", has been analyzed as a consequence of the interaction of the present tense with specific types of aspectual constructions which convey a bounded perspective on a situation. The current project sets out to analyze the manifestation of the present perfective paradox in a typologically adequate sample of languages. On the one hand, the project has descriptive objectives: it will chart the characteristics of present-tense constructions and the way they interact with different types of aspect, on the basis of existing grammars, questionnaires and advanced elicitation techniques. This description will provide a unique perspective on the meaning types that can be expressed by means of so-called present-tense constructions across languages. In addition to these descriptive goals, the project aims to offer theoretical contributions to the study of tense and aspect across languages, as it will provide cognitive-functional explanations for the patterns attested, both cross-linguistically and within specific languages. Ultimately, this typological investigation will allow us to come up with a semantic connectivity map, reflecting theoretically plausible patterns of polysemy and diachronic change for present-tense constructions." "Predictable ways of being unpredictable: Unconventional uses of verbal constructions." "Astrid De Wit" "Grammar and Pragmatics" "This project focuses on the exploitation of certain linguistic structures in order to convey a sense of unconventionality. In principle, there are countless ways in which language users of different languages can make use of the conventional properties of linguistic items (words, intonation etc.) in order to stand out, yet this project sets out to demonstrate that they can also resort to syntax for these purposes. We focus, more specifically, on three such syntactic constructions: the progressive (expressed by 'be + -ing' in English), GO-constructions, and COME-constructions. Our cross-linguistic study reveals that, irrespective of their degree of entrenchment in a given language, these constructions are being recruited not to encode, say, duration or motion, but simply to convey a sense of unconventionality. The main objective is thus to show that apparently unconventional grammatical choices are not random and unpredictable when looking at them from a crosslinguistic perspective." "Photonic reduction, frequency and word order. Towards an usage based analysis of phonetic reduction in (semi-) lexical constructions" "Department of Linguistics, Department of Dutch linguistics" "The research studies phonetic reduction phenomena across the word boundaries that cannot of explained by mechanisms such as ease of articulation and word frequency. The research hypothesis is that the formation of constructions, as formulated in construction grammar and grammaticalization research, can contribute to far reaching reduction of word sequences. The interaction of phonetic reduction, frequency and the development of constructions is examined in Dutch corpus data." "Literary Risk Constructions" "Elly McCausland" "Department of Literary Studies" "This project considers literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the prism of risk, a concept currently under investigation in sociological, political and economic studies that has significant implications for the humanities. John Tulloch and Deborah Lupton argue that ‘most sociological research has done little to enquire into the ways in which people broadly conceptualise and define “risk” as a concept’. Combining literary analysis with sociological work on risk, my project is premised on the idea that literature offers hitherto unexplored evidence of how ‘lay knowledges’ of risk are constructed and perpetuated. Risk in fictional and non-fictional discourse – particularly discourse that takes marginalized or ‘othered’ groups as its focus – has historically been a means by which we attempt to reproduce hegemonic power dynamics and ideologies. As Barbara Adam et al. argue, ‘Risks have become a considerable force of political mobilisation, often replacing references to, for example, inequalities associated with class, race and gender’. Modern risk scholarship has begun to take this further, with Anna Olofsson et al. defining what they term ‘intersectional’ risk theory: risk is ‘constructed and (re)produced in power relationships […] intrinsically connected to the processes by which the norms of gender, ethnicity and class are socially, performatively and intersectionally inscribed in language, mind and bodies’. I am interested in what Olofsson et al. identify as the ‘discursive imperative’ inherent in the language of risk, which ‘offers a means to challenge accepted notions, to promote special interests and to influence behaviour to attain a specific goal, or, by extension, to bring about specific forms of social change’. The potential for risk to serve as a site of resistance, and for literature to serve as a platform for competing constructions of risk, is the main theme of this interdisciplinary project." "A comparative study of alternating presentational constructions in Dutch, English and Italian. " "Klaas Willems" "Department of Linguistics" "This project investigates the functional range of and the alternation between four types of presentational constructions (prosodic inversion, syntactic inversion, syntactic inversion with filler insertion and syntactic split) in Dutch, English and Italian. The constructions are studied both from a language-specific and a contrastive perspective, using magnitude estimation tasks administered online through a crowdsourcing platform. " "Image constructions in literature. The author's image." "Jan Baetens" "Cultural Studies Research Group" "Image is an important concept in today's society, both on the macro-level of the economy and of politics and on the micro-level of the individual. Also within the literary field, image seems to be ever growing in importance. This importance manifests itself in the position of the successful writer as a media figure, but also in the rise of the autofictional genre. This project investigates the textual construciton of the author's image, on the one hand with the literaty text itself and on the other hand within other medial texts (websites, columns, interviews). In order to gain a more thorough insight into the image phenomenon within a literary context, the concept will be extracted from the research areas of marketing and sociology and implemented within the research program of semiotics (image as a medial construction of signs, cf. Roland Barthes Mythologies), the cultural studies (the influence of today's multimedial cultural industry on the identity concept) and literary theory (the opposition between the fictional and the extra-fictional, between the author, the implied author, the narrator and the characters). Both Michel Foucault's theory on the author function (Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?) and Wayne C. Booth's theory on the implied author (The Rethoric of Fiction) in which the author becomes a construction that springs from the literary text itself, will serve as theoretical backgrounds from which to investigate the matter."