Projects
How much does meaning matter? A fresh look at grammatical alternations KU Leuven
This project examines if and how the way people choose between different ways of saying the same thing depends on the meaning of the words in the utterance. Take variation between ditransitive dative constructions (as in “Tom sent the president a letter”) and prepositional dative constructions (as in “Tom sent a letter to the president”): variationist linguists are fairly good at modeling such variation based typically on formal predictors ...
The interaction between tense and lexical and grammatical aspect. A comparative study of present-timemarking in the verbal paradigm. University of Antwerp
The interaction between tense and lexical and grammatical aspect. A comparative study of present-time marking in the verbal paradigm. University of Antwerp
Putting specificational there-clefts on the map: a data-based investigation of their grammar, semantics, prosody and pragmatics KU Leuven
In the mainstream literature on English, there-clefts have been very much neglected. Only presentational-eventive there-clefts, which introduce a whole new event, have been recognized, e.g.
"there’s a family of brush turkeys have moved in."
In this project, we will develop grammatical, prosodic and semantic-pragmatic arguments, grounded in a strongly data-based approach, for recognizing specificational there-clefts, i.e. ...
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
Artificial Language Understanding in Robots (ATLANTIS) Vrije Universiteit Brussel
English focusing adjectives: their function in noun phrase structure, diachronic development and theoretical implications. KU Leuven
Connections between semantically or formally similar Dutch auxiliary constructions: the nature of horizontal links and their influence on grammar Ghent University
This project is aimed at the investigation of horizontal links in two clusters of constructions featuring the auxiliarized Dutch verbs komen ‘to come’ and krijgen ‘to get, receive’. Horizontal links, i.e. links between constructions which are not in a mother-daughter relation, constitute a topical issue in present-day construction grammar, but their nature and effects, as well as their interplay with other kinds of links that potentially ...