Projects
The interplay between language contact and language change in a fragmentary linguistic area: the Italic peninsula in the first millennium B.C.E. KU 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 ...
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 Ghent University
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 means
of communication. As such, the language community is continuously shrinking and the language is on the verge of ...
Language contact between migrating Bantu speakers and resident Khoisan speakers in southern Africa Ghent University
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 ...
Language contact and linguistic reconstruction: (pre)historic Bantu-Khoisan interactions in Southern Africa in a historical linguistic perspective Ghent University
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” ...
The grammaticalization of the future and conditional tense in the history of Ibero-Romance: a language and dialect contact approach Ghent University
The grammaticalisation of the future and conditional tense in the history of Ibero-Romance: a language and dialect contact approach. Ghent University
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 ...
Broadening the theoretical and methodological scope of translation and interpreting studies: towards an interdisciplinary language- contact framework Ghent University
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 ...
II International CROS Conference 2024: "Crossing the Borders: Spanish and other Languages and Literatures in Contact". Vrije Universiteit Brussel
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. Vrije Universiteit Brussel
(CLIL) has gained ever-increasing popularity in European education
contexts. The benefits of CLIL programs are therefore well
documented. Although the extent may vary depending on the
research context, CLIL often results in greater proficiency in the
program’s Target Language (TL), with few to no drawbacks in terms
of the learners’ mother tongue ...