Kurt Feyaerts
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I am a full professor at the Linguistics department of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and I teach courses on German grammar and proficiency, Structural features of spoken German, Constructions in interaction (German), and, since 2007, Humor & creativity in language. After my MA degree in Germanic linguistics (1990), I studied at the Westfälische Wilhelmsuniversität in Münster (1991) and worked as a research and teaching assistant at the University of Antwerp. In 1997, I obtained my PhD at KULeuven with a corpus study on the role of metonymy as a basic mechanism of conceptual creativity. In 2003, in close collaboration with Geert Brône and Paul Sambre, I founded the CHIL-research unit in which we adopt a cognitive linguistic perspective to look at different aspects of creativity in interaction. In 2008, I coordinated the six-month international research program The Agile Mind. Creativity in Discourse and Art at the Royal Flemish Academy for Science and the Arts in Brussels (VLAC). E-mail: firstname.lastname@arts.kuleuven.be |
Research interests
Both in my research and teaching, I have always been inspired by the interplay between two principles that underlie human interaction. On the one hand, we strive for rationalization of our communication as we make use of all sorts of patterns and conventions that must help us through the day. In interaction, on the other hand, most of us enjoy exploiting and manipulating these very routines on all possible levels for less rational, say creative, witty or humorous purposes. These observations feed my specific research topics:
- Aspects of conceptual creativity (constant renewal and variation of imagery involving various construal mechanisms; blending; frame semantics)
- Aspects of creative meaning negotiation throughout discourse
- Aspects of intersubjectivity (German modal particles, common ground)
- Aspects of (exploiting) routinization (idioms and phraseology, constructions in spoken interaction (German and Dutch))
- Aspects of multimodal creativity
Publications
Here are a few of Kurt's publications. For a complete list, see the CHIL publication list and the pdf-file below:
- [2006] Phraseology of Dutch. In: H. Burger et al. (eds.), Phraseologie/Phraseology (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 644-654.
- [2006] A Dynamic Account of Phraseological Meaning: Creative Variation in Headlines and Conversational Humor. International Journal of English Studies. (thematic issue on New Approaches to Phraseology). 6(1), 57-84.
- [2005] [with G. Brône] Expressivity and metonymic inferencing: Stylistic variation in non-literary language use. Style. 39-1, 12-35.
- [2003] Refining the Inheritance Hypothesis: Interaction between metaphoric and metonymic hierarchies. In: A. Barcelona (ed.), Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter: 59-78.
- [2003] [ed.] The Bible through Metaphor and Translation. A Cognitive Semantic Perspective. Religions & Discourse Vol. 15. Bern: Peter Lang, 301 p.
