Research team
Expertise
I conduct research in historical linguistics and dialectology of the Dutch language. An important focus of my work is the development of the sounds of Dutch and its varieties, and the accompanying changes in spelling. Spelling forms that function outside of standard orthography, such as in premodern texts or contempory dialect writing, are of special interest to me. My research methods include corpus linguistics and visualisation via (dialect) maps.
Premodern Antwerp Spelling Traditions Analysed (PASTA). A diachronic graphematic analysis of Antwerp 'schepenbrieven' (13th-16th century).
Abstract
PASTA (Premodern Antwerp Spelling Traditions Analysed) examines how late medieval and early modern Antwerp scribes encoded speech in writing, which phonetic and other principles motivated those practices, and how the implementation of these principles evolved over several centuries. Spelling systems are governed by the interacting principles of pronunciation, uniformity, analogy, etymology and graphotactics. For Dutch, there is still no large-scale, diachronic, token-based study of a single urban writing centre that jointly analyses these principles and the hierarchy of phonetic features expressed in spelling. PASTA fills this gap with a four-century corpus of Antwerp 'schepenbrieven' (aldermen's charters, 13th–16th c.), combining existing materials with circa 200 newly transcribed charters from the Felixarchief, all uniformly lemmatised and PoS-tagged. A dedicated grapheme-phoneme correspondence layer, implemented in an open-source Python module, supports quantitative and qualitative analyses of feature consistency through time. By comparing Antwerp outcomes with later norms, the project reconstructs an "alternative history" of Dutch orthography.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: De Wulf Chris
- Co-promoter: Pijpops Dirk
Research team(s)
Project type(s)
- Research Project