Peter Petré

I am a research professor at the University of Antwerp and the Principal Investigator of the Mind-Bending Grammars project. Between 2014-2015 I was assistent professor of English at the University of Lille 3 (France). As a researcher, I aim at keeping a wide view, combining insights and research methods from linguistics, psycholinguistics, history, philology, philosophy, and evolution research. As a lecturer, I have taught courses on English language and linguistics, historical linguistics, medieval literature, and corpus linguistics.

In the past ten years my research has taken some turns, moving from Old English up to Modern English, from smaller-scale corpora to Big Data, and from aggregate corpus research to research on individual variation and change. The thread linking all of this is my search for answers to the fundamental questions of why and how language changes.