Keynote Speakers


Dany Amiot

 

is Professor at the University of Lille (France) and affiliated to the CNRS research center STL (Savoirs, Textes, Langage). Her research mainly deals with the interface between morphology and syntax in French, from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. In her recent publications, she systematically applies the theoretical models of Construction Grammar and Construction Morphology. In 2011-2012, she coordinated the research project “Autour des constructions” (MESHS Lille Nord de France) and currently she participates in the research project “Category change from a constructionist perspective”, a collaborative project between the universities of Lille, Louvain-la-Neuve and Ghent, aiming at the investigation of lexical category shift in different European languages.

Selected publications

  •     Amiot, Dany & Walter De Mulder. 2015. Polycatégorialité et évolution diachronique: les emplois de après(-) et arrière(-). Langue Française 187. 137-153.

  •     Amiot, Dany. 2015. Grammaticalization of prepositions in French [art. 105]. In Peter O. Müller, Ingeborg Ohnheiser, Susan Olsen & Franz Rainer (eds.), Word-Formation. An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK)). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 1700-1713.

  •     Amiot, Dany & Kristel Van Goethem. 2012. A constructional account of French -clé 'key' and Dutch sleutel 'key' in mot-clé / sleutelwoord 'key-word'. Morphology 22. 347-364.

 

Holger Diessel

is Professor of English linguistics at the University of Jena (Germany). His research focuses on language change and language acquisition, from a usage-based perspective. He has published various articles on a wide range of topics including the grammaticalization of demonstratives and the acquisition of complex sentences. For the Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (Trousdale & Hoffman 2013), he wrote the chapter “Construction Grammar and First Language acquisition”, in which he provides an overview of the general assumptions of a constructionist approach to language acquisition

Selected publications

  •     Diessel, Holger. 2015. Usage-based construction grammar. In Ewa Dabrowska & Dagmar Divjak (eds.), Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 295-321.

  •     Diessel, Holger. 2013. Construction Grammar and First Language Acquisition. In Graeme Trousdale & Thomas Hoffmann (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 347-364.

  •     Diessel, Holger. 2004. The Acquisition of Complex Sentences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Steffen Höder

is currently Professor of Scandinavian Linguistics at the University of Kiel (Germany). His research mainly deals with language contact and language change. He developed the new theoretical model Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) in which he applies a constructionist perspective to the domains of contact linguistics and multilingualism. This approach is innovative as it takes the socio-cognitive reality of the language community as a starting point. Together with Hans Boas, he is co-editing the book Constructions in contact (working title; planned to appear in the series Constructional approaches to language).

Selected publications

  •     Höder, Steffen. 2012. Multilingual constructions: a diasystematic approach to common structures. In Kurt Braunmüller & Christoph Gabriel (eds.), Multilingual individuals and multilingual societies (Hamburg studies on multilingualism 13), Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. 241-257.

  •     Höder, Steffen. 2014a. Constructing diasystems. Grammatical organisation in bilingual groups. In Tor A. Åfarli & Brit Mæhlum (eds.), The sociolinguistics of grammar (Studies in language companion series 154), Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. 137-152.

  •     Höder, Steffen. 2014b. Phonological elements in Diasystematic Construction Grammar. Constructions and Frames 6. 202–231. [Republished in: Martin Hilpert & Jan-Ola Östman (eds.) (2016), Constructions across grammars (Benjamins current topics 82), Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. 67-96.]

               

Muriel Norde

is currently Professor of Linguistics at the Nordeuropa-Institut of the Humboldt University in Berlin (Germany). Earlier, she held the chair of Scandinavian languages at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). In her monograph Degrammaticalization (Oxford University Press), she convincingly demonstrates that there exist many counterexamples to the unidirectionality hypothesis in language change. In her recent publications, she deals with diachronic variation (such as debonding and exaptation) in Germanic languages from a constructionist perspective. She is currently writing a textbook on Diachronic Construction Morphology (to appear with Edinburgh University Press) and in collaboration with Kristel Van Goethem, Evie Coussé and Gudrun Vanderbauwhede, she is preparing an edited volume on Category change from a constructional perspective (John Benjamins).

Selected publications

  •     Norde, Muriel & Graeme Trousdale. 2016. Exaptation from the perspective of construction morphology. In Muriel Norde & Freek Van de Velde (eds.), Exaptation and Language Change. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 163-195.

  •     Norde, Muriel, De Clerck, Bernard & Timothy Colleman. 2014. The emergence of non-canonical degree modifiers in non-standard varieties of Dutch: a constructionalization perspective. In Ronny Boogaart, Timothy Colleman & Gijsbert Rutten (eds.), Extending the Scope of Construction Grammar. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton. 207-250.

  •     Norde, Muriel & Kristel Van Goethem. 2014. Bleaching, productivity and debonding of prefixoids. A corpus-based analysis of ‘giant’ in German and Swedish. Lingvisticae Investigationes 37:2. 256-274.

 

Remi van Trijp

obtained his PhD from the University of Antwerp (Belgium) in 2008 and is currently heading the Language Research unit at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris. He is one of the chief developers of Fluid Construction Grammar, a formalism of Construction Grammar that aims to shed new light on language acquisition, processing and evolution by developing experiments that combine techniques from computational linguistics, artificial intelligence and robotics. Within this frame he has recently published the monograph The evolution of case grammar (Language Science Press).

Selected publications

  •     van Trijp, Remi. 2011. A design pattern for argument structure constructions. In Luk Steels (ed.), Design Patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 115-145.

  •     van Trijp, Remi. 2015. Cognitive vs. generative construction grammar: The case of coercion and argument structure. Cognitive Linguistics 26:4. 613-632.

  •     van Trijp, Remi. 2016. Chopping down the syntax tree: What constructions can do instead. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 30. 15-38.