Current research topics include:
Development of a cognitive-functional theory of language. This includes issues such as:
- What should a cognitively and functionally plausible theory of language (a ‘grammar’) look like? This includes the further development of a general framework called ‘Functional Procedural Grammar’.
- The relationship between language and thought: The nature of conceptualization in relation to linguistic structure, the relationship between (the cognitive systems for) linguistic processing and conceptual processing.
- The relationship between/plausibility of current (‘traditional’) functionalist and cognitive linguistic theories, especially of grammar. With special focus on the issue of process models vs. constructionist models of grammar.
Form, meaning and function/use of modal/attitudinal and other qualificational (or TAM) categories and its implications for a cognitive-functional theory of language. This includes issues such as:
- Empirical analysis of the formal and semantic/functional properties of a range of (especially) epistemic and deontic expressions (auxiliary, adverbial/adjectival and verbal), with major focus on the Germanic languages, and especially Dutch. Corpus based and experimental, synchronic and diachronic.
- Implications for current concepts of the diachronic processes of grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification.
- The semantic and linguistic structure of ‘TAM-marking’ or the qualification of states of affairs in general, with special focus on the position of modal/attitudinal categories in the system. This includes issues such as the status/position of categories such as evidentiality, boulomaic attitude, dynamic ‘modality’, volition and intention, the semantic scope relations between and the hierarchization of qualificational categories, the relations between modal categories and sentence mood and other illocutionary notions.
- The status of the system of qualifications of states of affairs in a cognitively and functionally plausible theory of language, implications for the language and thought issue.