Projects
The Hierarchical lexicon: a contrastive study of productivitiy and schematicity in Nominal Compounds in German, Dutch and Swedish Ghent University
The project investigates the productivity and schematicity of nominal the compounds in German, Ductch and Swedish. Lexicological and Corpus-linguistic data are used to document convergences and divergences and to draw conclusions with regard to morphologica! theory (with special reference to the theory of the 'hierarchiecal lexicon' in construction morphology), the Germanic languages, and contrastive linguistics.
Contrastive research involving Spanish, English, French and Dutch: descriptive, computational and theoretical aspects. Ghent University
Addition of the Spanish component to the current Contragram research on verb structures in English, French and Dutch. More specifically: testing of a hypothesis regarding the difference between 'satellite framing' and 'verb framing' languages. Joint research is also envisaged on the limits of corpus-driven research, both imposed by the available software and by the nature of certain research questions.
From mass noun to count noun in French and Dutch. A contrastive corpus-based study on the nature and productivity of coercion Ghent University
This project proposes a detailed corpusbased contrastive analysis (French vs.Dutch) of a case of coercion, viz. the occasional use of mass nouns in constructions typical of count nouns, including also a limited experimental psycholinguistic verification. Besides the descriptive question (frequency, semantic effetcs, conditions/restrictions), the project addresses the question of the nature and relevance of coercion as a theoretical ...
Academic literacy in German as a foreign language: A corpus-based contrastive analysis of cohesion in written learner language. University of Antwerp
The relation between perception and production of L2 phoneme contrasts: a project in experimental phonology Ghent University
The project deals with the acquisition of phonological systems of a second language. When a learner acquires a new language, she has to learn to perceive and produce new phoneme contrasts. The porject aims to shed light on the nature of the relation between perception and production in the acquisition of new phoneme contrasts in a second language.
CONVERTA Ghent University
This is an Association Research Group (AOG) of Ghent University Association led by Prof. dr. Dr. D. Willems. The AOG brings together the Contragram research group at Ghent University and the Corpus Translation Studies research group at the University of Ghent Translation Studies. The aim is to be able to provide answers to the research questions that lie on the borderlines between the contrastive and translation themes. After all, data from ...
Sabbatical Karen Lahousse: The pragmatics-syntax interface in French: theoretical and sociolinguistic approach KU Leuven
The planned research focuses on the interaction of pragmatics with syntax in French, from a theoretical, sociolinguistic and innovative methodological perspective. Over the past five years, I have conducted research on the pragmatic concepts of topic, focus and contrast (i.e. discourse pragmatics, information structure), as expressed by syntactic structures and discourse markers (Lahousse 2017/2022a/2022b, Lahousse & Verwimp 2017, ...
Modeling causes of language change and conservatism (CAUSALITY) Ghent University
Universally, human language changes over time. One fundamental assumption about language change is that it originates at the level of an individual as a shift in frequencies with which a particular variant of linguistic expression is chosen over another. Conceiving of language change as the loss of an equilibrium in a system of stochastically used grammatical options, a change presupposes an emerging disturbing factor or a cause. A change can ...