Sebastien Vandenitte

I did both my Bachelor’s Degree in Modern Languages and Literatures and my Master’s Degree in Linguistics in Brussels at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Currently I work as a doctoral researcher at the LSFB-Lab of the University of Namur (UNamur) within the Namur Institute of Language, Text and Transmediality.

My research interests lie at the intersection between linguistics and gesture studies as I compare, from a multimodal perspective, sign languages to spoken languages and the gestures produced by speakers. The data I use in my PhD project are retrieved from the LSFB Corpus and the FRAPé Corpus, a multimodal corpus of Belgian French, to which I am contributing by collecting data.

• My PhD research project, which started in 2019, is funded by an F.R.S-FNRS Research Fellow grant.
• Thesis project: ‘Making referents seen and heard: comparing constructed action in LSFB and Belgian French’
• From January until July 2022, thanks to the support of the Sofina Boël grant, I had the opportunity to go to Finland, as a visiting researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, to compare constructed action in LSFB and suomalainen viittomakieli (Finnish Sign Language) and act as a collaborator to the ShowTell project.

• Member of the Scientific Committee of the Namur Institute of Language, Text and Transmediality
• Co-editor of the Papers of the Linguistics Society of Belgium (LSB) 2021
• Teaching experience: Classes/Workshops on the comparison of LSFB and French at UNamur