Projects
Sociolinguistic project on the Greek private letters on papyri and ostraca Ghent University
The project will investigate (1) the various formulas in letters lexically and syntactically, and will so examinate the epistolary usade diachronically. (2) Private letters are the best source of information for the everyday language (koinè); the standard formulas are the starting point for an investigation of the lexical adn syntactic variation in everyday koinè with special attention for sociolects, registers and bilingualism in ...
Language perception and language use in the county of Flanders: the sociolinguistic impact of 1302. KU Leuven
Function and form of the Spanish nominal vocative: between production, cognition and personality. Ghent University
In everyday speech, Spanish speakers frequently use vocatives, defined as (pro)nominal expressions used to directly address the interlocutor. Besides prototypical ‘proper noun’- vocatives, they have a wide gamut of vocatives at their disposal derived from common nouns and adjectives, which assume different interpersonal functions in discourse. As a result, the vocative is considered a strikingly productive category in Spanish, in terms of ...
Par excellence: italiano popolare in the 21st century KU Leuven
Par excellence: italiano popolare in the 21st century 1. Introduction: research questions and objectives This project deals with two sociolinguistic issues that have particularly challenged researchers in recent years. On a broader and theoretical sociolinguistic level, this project contributes to the current debate that centers around the notion of ‘language variety”. On a descriptive and empirical level, it wants to contribute to a strongly ...
Language Change and Multilingualism Ghent University
Languages change in both monolingual and multilingual environments. Multilingual communication involves using more than one language/dialect simultaneously in a communication environment. Although language mixing is observed initially at the surface level, structural and grammatical changes may also take place at the underlying levels depending on other variables in the context. There are challenges in identifying, processing and categorizing ...
Towards a diachronic typology of the middle voice KU Leuven
The middle voice is a complex linguistic domain, as it lies at the interface between morphosyntax and the structure of the lexicon. A typical example of a middle marking language is Dutch, in which the ‘reflexive’ pronoun zich in fact behaves as a middle marker, as it is used either lexically with verbs that only occur with the reflexive, e.g. zich vergissen ‘be mistaken’, or to derive reflexives from transitive verbs, e.g. zich(zelf) slaan ...
Syndetic and asyndetic complementation in Spanish. A diachronic probabilistic account KU Leuven
My dissertation focuses on the alternation between syndetic and asyndetic finite complement clauses in Spanish. Syndetic complements, introduced by an explicit complementizer que ‘that’, as in (1a), are the most frequent patterns of complementation in Present‑day Spanish. Alternatively, a complement clause can also be introduced asyndetically, i.e. without the complementizer que, as shown in (1b), where the absence of the complementizer is ...
Is leuk sufficiently cool? The social meaning of English loanwords: an acquisitional perspective KU Leuven
This project wants to investigate how the speech community of tomorrow, viz. elementary school children evaluate the use of English words in a Dutch context, which contextual parameters affect their evaluation and whether an evolution is visible in the dimensions shaping these attitudes as children grow older. By focusing on these questions, the project I am proposing intents to break new ground in the study of social meaning of English ...