Research

The research group of General Linguistics focuses on two fields of research, viz.

i) the syntax/semantics interface, with an emphasis on case theory and including language acquisition, and

ii) the linguistics/semiotics interface, with an emphasis on iconicity in language and the epistemology of linguistics as a science.

 

Ongoing research projects are:

a) Ditransitivity and the dative alternation in the history of English.

b) Referential hierarchies and alignment in Indo-Aryan, in particular the Kashmiri languages.

c) A corpus-based constructional analysis of case alternation (accusative and dative) with two-way prepositions in present-day German.

d) The role of explicit knowledge and instruction in language acquisition.

e) A corpus-based analysis of the alternation between the Dative Indirect Object Construction and the Prepositional Indirect Object Construction with ditransitive verbs of TRANSFER (geben, senden, schicken etc.) in present-day German.

f) A corpus-based analysis of the alternation between the Dative Indirect Object Construction and the Prepositional Indirect Object Construction with ditransitive verbs of TRANSFER in the history of New High German since 1650.

g) The acquisition of the Hindi case system by Dutch-speaking and English-speaking foreign language learners.

h) A comparative study of alternating presentational constructions (i.e., 'sentence-focus' or 'thetic' constructions) in Dutch, English and Italian.

 

The following projects have been completed since 2004:

a) Valency and coercion in German cognitive verbs.

b) Iconicity and phonology in Flemish Sign Language.

c) Adverbial phrase structure: Integrating Functional Grammar in Generative Syntax.

d) Polysemy and monosemy in structural and cognitive linguistics.

e) The theory and methodology of iconicity research in language.

f) The epistemological foundations of Louis Hjelmslev’s pre-glossematic and glossematic work.

g) Case marking, agreement and alignment in Indo-Aryan languages.

h) The acquisition of the German case system by Dutch-speaking foreign language learners.

i)  Neutralization in the lexicon.