Axel Holvoet - Biography#

Axel Holvoet graduated in Slavic languages and literatures at Ghent University in 1977, then he went to Poland in 1982 and worked mainly as a Slavic scholar, specializing in Polish (PhD thesis on aspect in Polish, 1983).

In the course of time, he got interested in Baltic languages, which he learned on his own and through a series of research visits. As of now, he has a good command of Latvian and a near-native knowledge of Lithuanian.

From 1988 on, Axel Holvoet started teaching Baltic languages and linguistics at Warsaw University, though his thesis for the Habilitation (1991) was still in the domain of Slavic.

In 1998, he moved to Lithuania, continuing to teach at Warsaw University. In Lithuania, he worked first at the Institute for the Lithuanian Language, and later at Vilnius University, where he has been teaching until now general linguistics (trends in contemporary linguistics, syntax, language typology, grammatical theory). He has participated in several international projects and created a series of publication "Valency, Argument Realization and Grammatical Relations in Baltic" (Amsterdam: John Benjamins). He is also a managing editor of "Baltic Linguistics" (published by Warsaw University).