Projects
Special Research Fund Professorship in Ancient Greek linguistics and historical sociolinguistics Ghent University
A professorship granted by the Special Research Fund is a primarily research-oriented position and is made available for excellent researchers with a high-quality research programme.
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” ...
A historical and typological linguistic study of Bantu influence in Malagasy. KU Leuven
Directionality in morphosyntactic change: West-Coastal Bantu as a historical test case for linguistic theory Ghent University
The proposed research will shed new light on a debate within Bantu, the largest language family in Africa and a recent offshoot of Niger-Congo, the world’s largest phylum. Many non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages have an analytical morphosyntactic profile, while a great majority of Bantu languages have an agglutinative profile, which was also reconstructed for Proto-Bantu. The controversy revolves around which of these two profiles is innovative. ...
אמת in the DSS: a cognitive linguistic, literary, and historical approach KU Leuven
This project aims at a philological discussion and semantic analysis of one of the apparent keywords, ʾemet—generally glossed as ‘truth’, but often meaning something different than English ‘truth’—in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in particular in three key texts in which ʾemet is particularly frequent, the Rule of the Community, the Thanksgiving Hymns, and 4QInstruction. The philological discussion aims largely at a first comprehensive critical ...
Poetry from the Margins. Literary, Philological, minguistic and historical analysis of a new corpus of byzantine Book Epigrams (800-1453) Ghent University
Literary, linguistic and historical analysis of a corpus of book epigrams from medieval Greek manuscripts. Unknown texts will be published with a commentary, both in paper version and on-line. The analysis will shed new light on the literary aesthetics of the Byzantine period, the evolution of medieval Greek language, orthography and verse forms, and the socio-historical context of the emergence of books and manuscripts.
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 ...
DIACRONEX: Supporting material with diachronic linguistics courses. KU Leuven
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 ...