Filip Verroens earned his PhD in Linguistics in 2011 at the University of Ghent, presenting a thesis on the French inchoative construction se mettre à, focusing on its syntax, semantics, and grammaticalization. Several of his subsequent publications revisit this topic from various perspectives. Additionally, he has delivered papers on other subjects, such as communication verbs in French. Broadly, his research spans two main areas:
- Theoretical linguistics, with a particular focus on French syntax, semantics, and language change (including grammaticalization and constructionalization).
- Applied linguistics (Second Language Acquisition), where he investigates how Dutch-speaking learners acquire French. His work in this area includes corpus-based analyses of morphosyntactic complexity, particularly in non-finite verb forms and Tense-Aspect-Mood (TAM) structures.
Filip Verroens has supervised multiple Master’s theses and served as a member of various examination boards, including roles as a member and secretary on PhD defense panels. He is also the creator of the user-friendly database Corpus Finder (https://www.corpusfinder.ugent.be). He has extensive teaching experience across different fields of linguistics, such as language and text structures and language and cognition, as well as in teaching methodology for French as a Foreign Language (FLE). His teaching appointments have included positions at the University of Ghent, the Catholic University of Leuven, and various university colleges.