The members of the Linguistic Research Unit focus their research on the concept of language in use, with the emphasis on analysing authentic data in several different languages.
The study of language in use and language practices highlights linguistic characteristics that are specific to a variety of communication situations, such as the use of language in a professional or academic setting, the process of learning foreign languages or the specific features of spoken and written language.
Corpus data is studied in various fields, particularly phonetics, prosody, syntax, vocabulary, phraseology and discourse.
The languages that are the main focus of research are French, English, Dutch, German and Spanish, in both spoken and written form, and as mother tongue or foreign language. In the case of French, the approach is both synchronic and diachronic.
The Linguistic Research Unit houses:
- The Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (CECL)
- The CENTAL platform (Natural Language Processing Centre)