QLVL members - Kris Heylen
Kris Heylen studied German and English literature and linguistics at the universities of Leuven and Tübingen. He was awarded his MA in Germanic Language Studies from Leuven University in 2000. Also in Leuven, he obtained an MSc in Artificial Intelligence with a specialization in Speech and Language Technology in 2001. A four-year research grant from the Fund for Scientific Research — Flanders (FWO) then allowed him to pursue research in German syntax. He was awarded a PhD in Linguistics from Leuven University in December 2005 for his dissertation on word order variation in German. Currently, he is a post-doctoral research fellow at the QLVL research unit.
E-mail: kris.heylen@arts.kuleuven.be
Phone: ++32 16 32 48 19
Fax: ++32 16 32 47 67
Surface mail: Department of Linguistics, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 PO
Box 03308, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium
Office: room 02.36 of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven
Research
Kris Heylen's research focuses on syntactic and lexical variation, and more specifically on the interaction between structural and contextual sources of linguistic variability. A particular point of interest in his analyses is the application of innovative methods to linguistic research questions by making use of extensive corpus data and statistical analysis.
In his PhD research, Kris looked into a central problem of German syntax, viz. the relative order of verb arguments in the Mittelfeld. Based on corpus data and multivariate statistical analyses, he investigated a less studied, but highly common, subtype of this word order variation that occurs when both a pronominally realized object and nominally realized subject are present in the Mittelfeld. Although the pronominal object mostly precedes the nominal subject in this case, it may also follow the nominal subject without any clear difference in meaning or grammaticality (e.g. dass ihn der Mann gesehen hat vs. dass der Mann ihn gesehen hat). Authentic usage data from different registers was coded for an extensive set of grammatical, semantic and pragmatic factors and their effect was analyzed through a multivariate statistical model. The study showed that the marked nominal-subject-before-pronominal-object order occurred significantly more often in subordinate clauses, with topical, agentive subjects, in spoken language use, and in German usage compared to Austrian and Swiss usage.
In his post-doctoral research, Kris is participating in the sem•metrix project that investigates the structure of lexical variation by developing measures to quantify the different subtypes of lexical variation.
Representative publications
The following publications are representative of Kris' research. The rest of his published work can be found in the QLVL publication list.
Heylen, K., J. Tummers and D. Geeraerts. In press. "Methodological issues in corpus-based Cognitive Linguistics". In Gitte Kristiansen en René Dirven (eds.), Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Language Variation, Cultural Models, Social Systems. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter.
Heylen, K. 2005. "A Quantitative Corpus Study of German Word Order Variation". In Stephan Kepser en Marga Reis (eds.), Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and Computational Perspectives 241-264. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter.
Heylen, K. & Speelman, D. 2003. "A corpus-based analysis of word order variation: The order of verb arguments in the German middle field". In Dawn Archer, Paul Rayson, Andrew Wilson and Tony McEnery (eds.), Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 Conference 320-329. Lancaster, UCREL.
