Hendrik De Smet studied English, Dutch and German
at the University of Leuven. As an exchange student he studied English
at the University of Helsinki. He obtained his MA in 2003. From
October 2003 to October 2004 he worked as a project researcher to
the project The diachronic evolution
of complement constructions in English: Distribution and motivation
(OT/2003/20/TBA). From October 2004 to October 2008 he worked as
a researcher of the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (FWO)
on a PhD supervised by Hubert Cuyckens
and Olga Fischer ( University of Amsterdam ), and entitled "The
Emergence and Diffusion of Gerund Clauses as Verbal Complements
in English". Since October 2008 he has started work as a postdoctoral
researcher of the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (FWO)
on a project entitled "Grammaticalization or diffusion: A contrastive
study of the factors and mechanisms in the development of English
and Dutch infinitives". His research is concerned with language
change in various domains of grammar and aims at integrating changes
and their underlying mechanisms with current views on synchronic
language structure, processing and use.
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