Particle verbs in English (e.g., brighten up, chill out, dream on) and in other Germanic languages (e.g., an·rufen in German, op·bellen in Dutch):

• their grammatical properties: how they differ from prepositional constructions, their aspectual values (in collaboration with Catherine Chauvin), their argument-structural properties, etc.

• their morphological and/or syntactic structure

• their often surprising derivations, such as cleaner-upperer

• their conventional and productive properties

• the challenges they pose to translation into Romance languages (in collaboration with Rudy Loock)

• how they are processed by the brain, also with respect to German ones (in collaboration with Friedemann Pulvermüller, Jeff Hanna and Yury Shtyrov)

Existential constructions — 'locative' (e.g. There are three bedrooms in the house), 'possessive' (e.g. This house has three bedrooms), and with exist (e.g. God does not exist) — in Western languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, etc.), Russian, and Arabic (in collaboration with Anne Carlier, Laure Sarda and colleagues):

• What are the specific syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of negative existential constructions (e.g. Il n’y a pas l’ombre d’un doute “There’s not the slightest shadow of a doubt”)? (in collaboration with Anne Carlier, Benjamin Fagard, and Machteld Meulleman)

• What semantic factors determine the choice between the locative construction and the possessive construction with human properties (e.g. There's great courage in her vs. She has great courage)? (in collaboration with Fayssal Tayalati and Vassil Mostrov)

• What is the rhetorical motivation to say, There's no such thing as X—it's called Y, which on the surface is illogical (as things that don't exist to begin with can't really have a wrong or right name)?

Modal verbs in English (can, may, must, should, ought to, etc.):

• Their semantic and pragmatic values, with evidence from The Simpsons (in collaboration with Ilse Depraetere, Benoît Leclercq, and Mégane Lesuisse)

• A semi-automatic method for identifying relevant sequences containing a modal verb in a corpus (e.g., You must be joking; Not if I can help it) (in collaboration with Ilse Depraetere and Mégane Lesuisse)

• Statistical techniques (logistic regression, random forests, etc.) to determine, based on large-scale corpus data, the syntactic, semantic, and discourse-related factors influencing the choice between two or more near-synonymous modals (such as should and ought to, in collaboration with Gert De Sutter, and for other groups of modals, with Ludovic De Cuypere, Ilse Depraetere, Cyril Grandin, and Benoît Leclercq, as well as with Susanne Flach and Martin Hilpert for experimental evidence of these choices)

Detailed descriptions of specific syntactic patterns: in addition to phrasal verbs, existential constructions, and modal structures (cf. above):

• the correlative comparative construction (the more (...), the better (...))

• the let alone construction (in collaboration with Edwige Dugas and Vera Tobin)

• the resultative double-object construction in Dutch (e.g., zich een breuk lachen, lit. ‘to laugh oneself a fracture’)

• expressions of visual perception (e.g., lancer un regard à X) in English, French, and Dutch, etc., with a specific focus on support verb constructions (in collaboration with Pâmela Fagundes Travassos)

• sentence fragments (also here and here)

Corpus-based translation studies:

• L1 interference in L2 translations: movement verbs, il y a vs. there is/are, and phrasal verbs (collaboration with Rudy Loock); passive constructions with a subordinate clause in extraposition (e.g. il est dit/constaté/... que... vs. it is believed/said/... that... (in collaboration with Samantha Laporte)

• Statistical methods to identify relevant differences between student translations and professional translations (in collaboration with Orphée De Clercq, Gert De Sutter, Rudy Loock, and Koen Plevoets)

Construction grammar (cognitive and usage-based) as an adequate linguistic theory:

• Schematic n-grams, i.e., consecutive sequences of n (e.g., 5) categories of words, extracted from a corpus (collaboration with Natalia Grabar), treated as frequent constructions forming the potential basis for a new type of grammar for language learners

• Distributional semantic methods (with visualizations) to arrive at the highly contextual meaning of words and morphemes such as fake, near-, pseudo- and quasi-, or arch- (collaboration with Pascal Denis and Mikaela Keller; and with Robert Daugs and Stefan Hartmann)

• Theoretical issues: Is there really a continuum between the lexicon and syntax, from lexical access to combinatory processing? (cf. the work in collaboration with Friedemann Pulvermüller and others); What is a construction, in fact? (collaboration with, among others, Benoît Leclercq, Diogo Oliveira Pinheiro, and Pâmela Fagundes Travassos); Is construction grammar a falsifiable theory of linguistic cognition?