Projects
Multilingual landscapes and linguistic vitality in urban surroundings: case-studies of Brussels and Amsterdam. Ghent University
This project aims to address the vitality and structured linguistic hierarchies of languages used and displayed in the linguistic landscapes of Brussels and Amsterdam by means of quantitative and qualitative methodologies as well as geographical analyses. The project also aims to address the current conceptual void and lack of clarity on the relation between vitality and linguistic landscapes in general.
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” ...
Measuring linguistic attitudes with auditory affective priming: Attitudinal variation towards varieties of Dutch KU Leuven
The objective of this work is twofold. It sets out to contribute to the study of language attitudes on a methodological as well as a descriptive level. The main goal of the study is the methodological one. Notwithstanding some exceptions (e.g. Preston 1982), quantitative language attitude research has known little methodological innovation since the introduction of the matched-guise technique in the 1960s (Lambert et al. 1960). This relative ...
The Road to Alexandria. The Sensation of Landscapes in European Travel Writing, 1919-1939 Vrije Universiteit Brussel
‘gazes’ on foreign people and places. Challenging the longstanding
neglect of non-visual sensations, this project will analyze the
interplay of sounds, tastes, smells, and textures in non-fictional
published travel accounts. This approach will be applied to the
sensation of arduous landscape types in Southeastern Europe and
Western ...
Sustainable yet forgotten. Rediscovering the contribution of the Belgian art networks to the second wave of environmentalism Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Argument marking in the Amazonian languages of the Guaporé-Mamoré region Ghent University
Grammatical relations are central to the scientific study of languages, and yet the indigenous languages spoken in Amazonia often challenge conventional approaches to the notion of grammatical subject and object. This project, which will include on-site linguistic fieldwork, proposes a novel investigation into the the properties of grammatical relations in a sample of Amazonian languages spoken in the highly diverse Guaporé-Mamoré area in ...
The grammaticalisation of the future and conditional tense in the history of Ibero-Romance: a language and dialect contact approach. Ghent University
The development of the future and conditional tense in Castilian – as in Romance in general – has been universally acknowledged as a typical case of grammaticalisation, whereby the two components of the Latin periphrasis [infinitive + HABERE] fused into a synthetic form (cantaré, cantaría). In Old Castilian variation between synthetic forms and analytic forms (cantar lo é, cantar lo ía) can be witnessed, which indicates that the ...
Chaos before order? A quantitative approach to variation in the Arabic papyri (7th-9th centuries CE) Ghent University
Arabic was catapulted onto the world stage by the Arab-Islamic conquests of the 7th century CE. Within a few centuries, it was the international medium of science and communication. ‘Classical Arabic’, as this stage is called by modern scholars, has traditionally provided the lens through which the earliest documents of the Islamic period have been read (7th-9th centuries CE). Yet, these documents contain considerable variation, sometimes ...
Legal history meets lexical semantics. Feudal legal terminology in Flanders and England of the 13th and 14th centuries. Ghent University
This project will study the intricacies of medieval multilingualism in law by researching the use of
feudal legal terminology in England and the (Dutch-speaking) part of the county of Flanders during
the 13th and 14th centuries in parallel to examining the development of the corresponding legal
concepts in relation to land tenure. The linguistic landscape in both cases was inhabited by Latin,
French and a Germanic ...