Projects
Languages writing history. The impact of language studies beyond linguistics (1700-1860) KU Leuven
Before the study of language was institutionalized, and concentrated, in the discipline of linguistics in the 19th century, languages were central to understanding mankind and, therefore, to scholarship in the humanities. Once historical and linguistic knowledge came to be collected, systematized, categorized, codified, and transmitted in institutionalized disciplines, boundaries arose between the new disciplines. This project aims to focus ...
The concept of functional opposition in general linguistics, 1916-1966: methodological status and technicaldescriptive relevance. KU Leuven
Although “difference” as an undefined, almost intuitive concept has played a role in linguistic thought and practice from the early beginnings, it was only in the 20th century that a “technical”, operational concept of fundamental axiomatic importance for linguistic description was formulated and argued for in terms of “differential” and “oppositional” relationship. The Cours of F. de Saussure (1916) systematizes this concept, specifically in ...
Corpus linguistics in the Greek papyri: developing a corpus to study variation and change in the post-classical Greek complementation system KU Leuven
The aim of this PhD project is to advance the corpus-linguistic study of the Greek papyri, a large diachronic corpus (3rd century BC – 8th century AD) of non-literary Greek. It consists of two central parts. The first part is focused on corpus design: starting from the transcribed (XML) version of these texts, it describes a pipeline model to supply the papyri step for step with linguistic information, using natural language ...
Theory meets Quantity: Corpus-based Comparative Syntax KU Leuven
The availability of digital corpora and sophisticated tools to extract information from them provides exciting opportunities to carry out groundbreaking research in linguistics. This project explores the potential of corpus-based research for comparative syntax. On a more general level, this project aims to investigate how the data-driven approach of corpus linguistics can optimally be combined with the knowledge-based approach of theoretical ...
Gathering Language. Language atlases, comparative grammars, and ethnolinguistic classification in the long 19th century KU Leuven
In the 19th century, language became the object of a 'science of language', i.e. linguistics. My research is concerned with how the languages of the world were mapped and made part of that science. This requires an analysis of how linguistic fieldwork and language classification overlapped with geography and ethnic (racial) classification, in an ethically problematic context. Thus my research contributes to a global history of knowledge from ...
Presentational cleft sentences in French and Italian: a comparative corpus-based analysis. KU Leuven
Cleft sentences are sentences which have a split (cleft) form, but whose meaning corresponds to that of a simple sentence. They fall into two categories, specificational (1) and presentational (2) clefts, which are introduced by different types of presentative items (henceforth PIs).
(1) [Context: - Who is singing?]
F: - C’est Jean qui chante.
I: - È Gianni che canta.
lit. It’s John who is ...