Projects
Speech-act orientation and intersubjective alignment: modal and evidential meanings of Spanish conditional and future forms KU Leuven
Speech-act orientation and intersubjective alignment: modal and evidential meanings of Spanish conditional and future forms KU Leuven
This project seeks to use corpus evidence to gain a better insight into the relationship between modal and evidential meanings of the Spanish conditional and future markers, and to inquire into their spreading into new territories, semantically and pragmatically, in the Peninsular and Rioplatense varieties. This is to be done through a set of case studies on the development of un(der)described constructions such as EstarÃa necesitando un ...
Corpus-based extraction of quantitative structural and systemic features of constructional paradigms as they evolve over time Ghent University
Diachronic Construction Grammar currently faces two challenges that tie to the systemic nature of language organization. On the one hand, schematic constructions characterized by a filler slot (such as the verb in the [be about to {V}] construction) have been associated with a paradoxical observation: an increase in the number of types recruited in the slot of the construction can co-occur with a general decline in frequency of use. On the ...
Subject personal pronouns in Caribbean Spanish: The interplay of markedness of coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming. KU Leuven
In Spanish, speakers may refer to non-contrastive human-reference subjects with a combination of a subject personal pronoun (SPP) and the person-number ending of the verb (e.g., Yo trabajo I work) or only with the person-number ending (e.g., Trabajo [I] work). Earlier research has shown that the use of a SPP is more likely when the reference of the subject differs from that of the subject of the previous sentence, with first- and ...
A comprehensive semantic and formal description of nominal groups that take complement clauses in English: a neglected source of grammaticalization and subjectification processes and locus of synchronic variation. KU Leuven
A Respeaking and Collaborative Game-Based Approach to Building a Parsed Corpus of European Spanish Dialects Ghent University
The study of dialectal microvariation of Spanish spoken in Spain has until recently mainly focused on lexical and phonetic features. The morphosyntax of these dialects, on the contrary, remains largely unexplored, despite the recent surge in interest in dialect grammars. This is due to the lack of large annotated dialectal corpora. The proposed project aims to fill this lacuna and will create the first morphosyntactically annotated and ...
The development of small clauses in English: constructional growth and decline KU Leuven
This study investigates the development of the English Secondary Predicate Construction, against the background of current views on language change. A Secondary Predicate Construction, or SPC, consists of a verb, a noun phrase (NP), and an Xphrase (XP). The NP and XP are in a predicative relation, similar to a subject-predicate relation in a copular clause. In (1a) for instance, consider him handsome involves a verb ...
Syndetic and asyndetic complementation in Spanish. A diachronic probabilistic account KU Leuven
My dissertation focuses on the alternation between syndetic and asyndetic finite complement clauses in Spanish. Syndetic complements, introduced by an explicit complementizer que ‘that’, as in (1a), are the most frequent patterns of complementation in Present‑day Spanish. Alternatively, a complement clause can also be introduced asyndetically, i.e. without the complementizer que, as shown in (1b), where the absence of the complementizer is ...
The factive-reported distinction in English. Representational and interpersonal semantics. KU Leuven
Ever since Kiparsky & Kiparsky's (1970) seminal paper, it has been recognized that the English complementation system makes a distinction between factive complements (e.g. He doesn't like John's nomination for the award/that John was nominated for the award.) and reported complements (e.g. He said ?John's nomination for the award/He said that John was nominated for the award.) However, the semantico-functional motivation for this ...