Sven Van Hulle started studying Linguistics and Litterature Latin-French at the Ghent university in 2011. In 2015 he received his Master's degree of Latin and French Linguistics and Litterature. The topic of his master's thesis for French linguistics was the the diachronic evolution from the latin verbs sapere and cognoscere to the French cognates savoir and connaître and their morphological and syntactic behaviour. From 2015 to 2017 he studied Spanish Linguistics in order to obtain a Master degree in Spanish Linguistics. From september 2013 to february 2014 he lived in Salamanca, Spain as an Erasmus-student. From february 2017 to august 2017 he lived in La Plata, Argentine, where he finished his Master's year of Spanish. His Spanish master's thesis was about the verbal periphrasis in Spanish and more specifically the inchoative construction romper a + infinitive.
Sven worked as a teacher for Latin, French and Spanish in secundary schools in the period of september 2017 to june 2019.
In october 2019 he started working as a PhD-researcher for the GOA-project 'Language Productivity at work'. For this project, he studies the productivity of the inchoative construction in Spanish. This construction consists of a new paradigm of inchoative auxiliaries in Spanish: Rompió a llorar (lit. ‘he broke to cry’). ). Inchoative constructions express the onset of an event, and consist of four slots: a subject, an auxiliary verb, a preposition, and an infinitive. As opposed to other Romance languages, the yet understudied construction has become strikingly productive in Spanish, where a wide gamut of verb classes fills the auxiliary verb slot, for instance: change of state verbs (e.g. romper), motion verbs (Se echó a reír, lit. ‘she threw herself to laugh’) or put verbs (Se mete a escribir, lit. ‘she puts herself to write’). A second source of productivity relates to the infinitive slot. We will track the historical development of the filler classes in both slots, and their interactions, against the background of the constructionalization of a more abstract inchoative pattern, and examine the parameters that determine the competition between the auxiliary verbs.
His general research interests are comparative and diachronic linguistics [especially in Romance languages], morphosyntax, grammaticalization, constructionalization, construction grammar.
