The research conducted in GLIMS deals with ‘grammar’ in the broad sense of the term, that is to say (morpho)syntax and semantics, including both the interface with the lexicon (and lexical morphology) and with discourse. Most of our work is related to the following fields of interest: the grammar of the clause and the verbal and nominal group; grammatical alternations; aspect and modality / evidentiality; clause combining/embedding; discourse markers and the impact of information structure.
Besides refining the description of a wide range of specific languages and linguistic phenomena (esp. focusing on underexplored language patterns), our research also contributes to general linguistic theory through a hypothesis-driven focus on theoretical concepts in current grammar research, including meta-theoretical analysis and the historiography of the discipline.
Although our research is not committed to any particular theoretical framework, it shares the general assumption that linguistic structure is symbolic, and hence that ‘meaning’ is fundamental to formal structure. Hence, much of our work is conducted in functionally and/or cognitively oriented frameworks, including constructionist approaches (e.g. Construction Grammar, Systemic Functional Grammar, Functional Discourse Grammar, Structural Functionalism, Cognitive Grammar).
In line with a longstanding local research tradition in contrastive linguistics (cf. the Contragram project), much of our work implies micro-typological comparison of (mainly) West-European languages, with a special focus on Romance and Germanic languages. As to methodology, most investigations start from the analysis of – mainly synchronic – language data, combining (quantified) corpus research with other empirical methods such as acceptability judgments and, to a lesser extent, experiments.