Projects
Evidentiality and evidential marking in French. University of Antwerp
Re-mapping the transnational spread of the novel: French pseudo-translations in German translation (1731-1776). KU Leuven
i-LAP: The role of Input in English and French LAnguage Proficiency KU Leuven
English phrases, French verbs: The interaction between loan word accommodation and grammatical change in Middle English KU Leuven
French heavily influenced the English lexicon, mainly during the Middle English period (1100-1500). However, it does not seem to have affected the grammar of English. This is because in Middle English society French functioned as a high-prestige but essentially second language. In such situations, transfer tends to mainly involve lexical borrowing. However, the effects of contact may go beyond direct transfer. Loan words need to be ...
Science in Text and Context. The Development of French Medical Terminology in Evrart de Conty's Problemes against the Background of Medieval Medical Discourse. KU Leuven
i-LAP: the role of Input in English and French LAnguage Proficiency KU Leuven
This cross-linguistic project aims to advance our understanding of the input-acquisition relationship in Flemish learners’ English and French language proficiency by investigating the mechanisms underlying language learning by learners who have English and French at school, but who are exposed to English outside of school and have a later starting age for formal English instruction than for French. Language learners can be exposed to language ...
A corpus-based study of the prosody and information structure of English it-clefts and French c'est-clefts. KU Leuven
In English and French, clefts are a productive resource serving information structural purposes, which makes them a particularly useful device to fulfil specific communicative and rhetorical goals. This study investigates the use of cleft constructions in the two languages, first in their own right and then contrastively. Using data from comparable corpora of spontaneous dialogues, I show that clefts display a wider variation in their ...
V2 violations in French Flemish: nature, origin and microvariation. Ghent University
Many languages have a basic verb second (V2) word order. This means that the verb linearly takes
the second position in declarative main clauses, for instance in Standard Dutch (SD, 1).
1) Het spatte in alle richtingen.
it splashed in all directions
In one Dutch dialect, West-Flemish (WF), the verb can also be the third constituent in the clause
instead of the second one. This can only happen if the clause is ...
Ya les oiseaux qui chantent. A corpus analysis of French il y a clefts KU Leuven
The main goal of this research project is to gain a deeper insight into the syntactic, semantic and discourse-functional characteristics of cleft sentences. The study departs from a thorough corpus analysis of French il y a ‘there is’ clefts (1). The main findings are then compared with a small-scale corpus of Italian c’è ‘there is’ clefts (2).
(1) Il y a les oiseaux qui chantent.
‘The birds are ...