Department of Language and Communication

The Nijmegen team will contribute to this network expertise in usage-based analysis which fuses methods from sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics to investigate national differences in the grammar of Dutch. With Dirk Speelman (QLVL Leuven), we compare machine learning models and traditional regression analysis to get a grip on the division of labor between lexical, semantic, and syntactic driving forces of constructional preferences in Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch. And with Dirk Speelman (QLVL Leuven) and Roeland van Hout (CLS Nijmegen) we conduct experimental research to investigate the impact of subjective determinants (notably prestige and ideology) on syntactic choice.

The Nijmegen group founded the partnership New Ways of Analyzing Syntactic Variation, which convened psychologists, sociosyntacticians, and computer linguists to boost interdisciplinary collaboration on syntax (the partnership was launched in 2012 during an international conference in Nijmegen; a second edition took place in Ghent in 2016).

https://www.ru.nl/english/education/masters-programmes/fields-interest/language-communication/