Hubert Cuyckens, Professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Leuven, has received an honorary doctorate at the Faculty of Arts, University of Gothenburg.
As Dean Margaretha Hallberg stated in a communication, Professor Cuyckens’ professorship at the Swedish university in the autumn of last year has been an enormous impetus to linguistic research by the Faculty of Arts. Particularly appreciated were his lectures on grammaticalisation, the language change process that creates new grammatical words such as prepositions and conjunctions.
Professor Cuyckens is not only active in historical linguistics. He is also an internationally renowned researcher in the field of cognitive linguistics, a branch of linguistics that sees language as an integral part of human cognitive capacity and that states that there would not be an autonomous linguistic function within our brain.
Together with his Louvain colleague Dirk Geeraerts, Hubert Cuyckens is the editor of the prestigious reference work entitled ‘The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics’, that was published in 2007 by Oxford University Press. The work offers a unique survey of the theoretical concepts and models in cognitive linguistics.
