PhD theses

The Amsterdam poet Hans Faverey (1933-1990) is renowned for his pithy and hermetic writing style. His work is also deeply intertextual. It explores many fields such as literature and philosophy but also music, painting and etching. Véronique Dieu’s PhD project will, first and foremost, provide a detailed overview of the intertextual relationships in Faverey’s work. So far, scant attention has been paid to the possible influence of Chinese philosophers and poets. Yet, the contents of Faverey’s personal library and statements made in interviews reveal that he had a great interest in oriental literature, art and thought. Taking Faverey’s oriental library as a starting point, the aim of the project is to shed a clearer light on those possible connections.

Marie Jadot’s research focuses on the musical dimension in contemporary English and Dutch war literature. In her PhD project, she examines a corpus that consists of post-Holocaust literary works by Dutch writers. To explore the musical dimension of these texts, she adopts an interdisciplinary approach that fuses insights from literary theory, trauma studies, philosophy, intermediality studies and cognitive linguistic approaches to language and literature.

As a follow-up to Marie Viérin’s master’s thesis, which focussed on the portrayal of Greek poetess Sappho in 19th- and 20th-century Dutch literature, her PhD project aims to explore the relationships between women as depicted in Dutch-language literature during the first half of the 20th century, both through the lens of gender studies and cultural studies. Her primary goal is to reflect on the social dynamics that exist between heteronormative and non-heteronormative individuals and communities, as well as on the notions of identity and cultural heritage.

This PhD aims at a contrastive study of English, Dutch and French complex prepositions from a diachronic angle and study the impact of language contact. Most literature on the languages studied focus on preposition noun preposition constructions, but their morpho-syntactic development and semantics are often explained for each language separately. Starting from the observation that French is predominant from the Middle Ages onwards when it comes to the use of complex prepositions and the particular similarities of the first constructions of this type in English and Dutch, the PhD empirically tests the hypothesis of the importance of linguistic contact to explain the emergence of these constructions in the two Germanic languages.

The project aims to determine how French native speakers, Dutch native speakers, and French-speaking CLIL-pupils express motion events in both speech and co-speech gesture (CLIL = Content and Language Integrated Learning). Christina Piot’s research is based on the difference between verb-framed languages and satellite-framed languages and the fact that several studies have suggested that the typological differences between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages are reflected in co-speech gestures.

This PhD project is primarily focused on the field of intercomprehension, which refers to receptive multilingualism within language families. The term receptive multilingualism is used when talking about an individual or group of individuals able to understand a language that they have not had any close contact with by drawing on their knowledge of their mother tongue or an Lx. The dissertation is going to build and expand on Danny Schwall’s master paper, taking a closer look at the potential practical application of intercomprehension in the context of language classes to allow for communication between people without having to rely on a lingua franca.

This PhD project aims to explore the phenomenon of split intransitivity (also known as split-S, semantic alignment, active-stative alignment, or unaccusativity), where intransitive verbs in a language show a morphosyntactic split and are accordingly divided into two subclasses, labelled unergative and unaccusative. The project will focus on languages of the Pamir Hindu Kush area, which exhibit various alignment patterns across different language families. Adopting an areal-typological and diachronic perspective, it seeks to shed light on the nature as well as the emergence and development of split intransitivity in the languages of this area. In the process, it will address the question of whether the developments are the result of the dominant structural pattern for a specific genetic unit, the result of pattern borrowing, or just historical accidents.