Ongoing language projects within the LOT institutes

Causal relations between discourse segments can be expressed by connectives like because and so. What does it mean when speakers use one of two similar connectives rather than the other? How do language users process causal relations? And how do children acquire these textual 'building stones'?

The ultimate goal of CLARIN is the construction and operation of a shared distributed infrastructure that aims at making language resources and technology available to the humanities and social sciences research communities at large. The present project will pave the way for its implementation.

The aim of the research group CSVA is to investigate, on a comparatistic basis, the functioning of Verbal aspect in Slavic languages (in which aspect is always marked on the lexical level) as well as non-Slavic languages (in which aspect may exist as a morphological category).

The research program "Conversationalization in discourse" is led by Professor Wilbert Spooren and Professor Gerard Steen. Its main aim is to give a more precise linguistic description of the development of conversationalization in news texts.

The goal of this PhD project is to investigate cross-linguistic distribution and properties of copular particles.

Demographically, developed countries are increasingly characterized by two trends: multiculturalism and a larger proportion of elderly. The first is caused by increased international mobility (Dovidio & Esses, 2001), the second by dropping fertility rates and longer life expectancies (Alho, 2008). Although both are seen as societal challenges, the accumulation of these trends brings a challenge of its own, which has been largely ignored so far: older migrants tend to have special interactional and communicative needs that are not met by current services geared towards the indigenous elderly. As more migrants reach an advanced age, this problem will increase in the coming years.

According to self-reports and reports of caretakers, aging migrants tend to show a preoccupation with the culture of origin. Typically, they often also revert to the language which they may have hardly used for decades (Schmid & Keijzer, forthc.). This development is known as language reversion: the second language (L2) recedes and the first language (L1) becomes stronger again (de Bot & Clyne, 1989). In one of its manifestations this reversion process can seriously impede or even break down communication with the next generation who were not raised speaking their parent’s first language.

This study combines multilingualism and aging into a lifespan approach to bilingual proficiency in healthy, aging migrants. The rather simplistic observation that the L1 improves and the L2 erodes linearly with age is assessed against a more complex perspective which takes into account insights from cognitive aging and psycholinguistic aspects of activation and inhibition. The predictions made on this basis are qualitatively and quantitatively tested in an exploration of ´old age language development´ in Dutch migrants in Australia.

The status of 'ambivalent' segments, i.e. segments whose behaviour seems to be at odds with their realization. Particular attention is paid to the contrast between sonorants and obstruents, which is not always straightforward.