Projects
Cappadocian word order from a historical and typological perspective Ghent University
Cappadocian is a mixed language which is diachronically descended from Greek but has borrowed heavily from Turkish with which it has been in contact for eight centuries From a typological perspective, Turkish is an SOV language: the unmarked word order is Subject-Object-Verb and as a typological corrollary it has prenominal modifiers (adjectives, pronominal determiners and relative clauses) and verbal and nominal suffixes Turkish word order ...
Fairness in Multilingual NLP KU Leuven
Transitivity oppositions in a diachronic typological perspective: Labile Verbs in the history of the Indo-European languages Ghent University
Many linguists believe that the language of our Indo-European ancestors had a considerable number of verbs which may appear both in intransitive and transitive constructions with no formal change in the verb, as in the case of English "The door opened" ~ "John opened the door" or Dutch "De sleutel draait in het slot" ("The key turns in the lock") ~ "Jan draait de sleutel in het slot" ("John turns the key in the lock"). Such verbs are called ...
A historical and typological linguistic study of Bantu influence in Malagasy. KU Leuven
A 1000 km long city: Dissecting the Great Post Road and the enduring legacy of a colonial infrastructure in Java KU Leuven
Colonial infrastructures always retain an enduring and controversial effect on the material configuration of territories and the people who inhabit them. At the start of the 19th c., the Dutch colonisers built the 1000 km long Great Post Road on the coastline of Java Island that triggered the long process of modernisation of the territory. The road changed the island's spatial configuration, facilitating the emergence of new architectural ...
How to catch the present? A typological study of present-tense marking University of Antwerp
Trilingual code-switching in the nominal domain: Evidence from two speech communities. KU Leuven
The variability of ergativity in the Indo-Aryan languages of the South-Asian sub¬continent. A typological study of the ergative patterning of Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Assamese, Nepali, Marathi, Marwari, Sindhi, Punjabi and Gujarati. Ghent University
This typological study of various Indo-Aryan languages comprises two objectives: i) to elucidate, by means of a synchronic comparison, the diachronic problem of the disappearance or degeneration of the ergative construction in split ergative languages ii) to offer an empirical grounding for a better understanding of the phenomenon of ergativity and to offer an attempt to a general definition of it.
Onset and (De)Grammaticalization of Genitive of Negation in Germanic: A Historical and Typological Analysis Ghent University
The proposed project aims to determine the origins and diachronic development of “genitive of negation” (GenNeg) in Germanic, and to evaluate its relationship with GenNeg as found in Balto-Slavic and Balto-Finnic languages from a historical, and typological viewpoint. GenNeg is a morphosyntactic phenomenon whereby the argument (subject/direct object) of a verb is assigned the genitive/partitive case under negation. This phenomenon is ...