Nele Van Den Driessche obtained her Master’s degrees in Spanish and French Linguistics and Literature (2020) and Teaching (2021) at Ghent University. During the third year of her Bachelor's degree, she studied one semester at the University of Seville, Spain.
In 2021, after being awarded a Special Research Fund scholarship (BOF), she joined the Spanish Linguistics department and started her PhD research project, carried out under the joint supervision of Prof. Dr. Renata Enghels and Prof. Dr. Marlies Jansegers. Her project focuses on recent language change within Spanish teenage talk. She is particularly interested in how the lexicon and syntax of Spanish teenage talk has changed in the 21st century. Her project combines corpus research (COLAm and CORMA) as well as an experimental aspect, and adopts a functional-cognitive perspective. In November 2022 she was granted a FWO fellowship for the same research project.
Under the direction of Prof. Dr. Renata Enghels, she has also been collaborating in the development of the CORMA corpus (Corpus Oral de Madrid), in collaboration with Fien De Latte, Linde Roels, amongst others. This corpus is a collection of spoken language that represents the dynamic speech of Madrid, as observed between 2016-2019. It consists of 106 conversations among 485 speakers from Madrid, culminating in 57 hours of recording (see Enghels, De Latte & Roels, 2020). The recordings and transcriptions are currently available on a UGent network drive. Access to the archive can be requested by reaching out to Renata.Enghels@ugent.be.
