Hubert Cuyckens - Biography#
Hubert Cuyckens is emeritus professor of English language and linguistics and a member of the QLVL (Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics) research group. He studied Germanic languages (Dutch and English), with a specialization in linguistics, and he received his PhD – The semantics of spatial prepositions in Dutch: A cognitive-semantic analysis – from the University of Antwerp in 1991.
From 1982 to 1997, he worked at the University of Antwerp, first as a research fellow of the National Fund of Scientific Research (now, FWO) and from 1985 as a teacher/lecturer of English and Business English. He spent the academic year 1997–1998 at the English Department of the University of Hamburg as a Humboldt Research Fellow, investigating synchronic variation and diachronic change in prepositions. In 1998, he obtained a tenured position at the University of Leuven, where he mainly taught courses in the domain of English historical linguistics (in addition to English Phonetics, English Proficiency and English Business Communication).
While retaining an interest in cognitive semantics (and the semantic study of prepositions in particular), Hubert Cuyckens’ main research focus lies in the domain of historical syntax of English. Specific attention goes to grammaticalization phenomena, their interface with construction grammar, and diachronic developments in the system of verbal clause complementation. Recently, he has turned his attention to historical variation and competition of non-finite vs. finite complementation, thus marrying the variationist with the diachronic syntactic research agenda. His theoretical orientation has always been that of cognitive-functional and usage-based linguistics. Within these research domains, he has (co-)supervised a substantial number of PhD students.
In addition to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, which he co-edited with Dirk Geeraerts, Hubert Cuyckens has (co-)edited several collective volumes and special journal issues on (English) historical linguistics, grammaticalization, lexical semantics and adpositions. From 2013 to 2018, he was also Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Folia Linguistica. In October 2016, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Göteborg.
