All classes and lectures are open to all Summer School participants (CIVIS students and non-CIVIS students)
[Please note that social events may include extra cost for food and/or transportation]
TITLES & ABSTRACTS OF CLASSES
Comparative & Contrastive Diachronic Linguistics - Language Contact
Sigríður Sigurðardóttir
Yale
Forecasting the propagation of language change
In this lecture I present fundamental ways of approaching the study of language change. I argue that language forecasting, i.e. predictions about language in the future, offers a novel way of studying change over time. Using examples from Icelandic, I show how the propagation of language change may be predicted.
Nikolaos Lavidas
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Written Language Contact in Diachrony: An Introduction
The aim of our class is to introduce participants to the fundamental approaches to the study of the characteristics, status and role of translation in the diachrony of languages.
Translations and translators have influenced aspects of the diachrony of languages to a significant degree, as well as all domains related to the language, dictionaries, alphabets, national literatures, the diffusion of knowledge and the spread and practices of religions.
We will concentrate on the analysis of different types of language contact and borrowing/ transfer through translations.
Tandem class by Katrin Axel-Tober and Sarah Dessì Schmid
University of Tübingen
How grammar is created and shaped: Grammaticalization processes in the histories of Germanic and Romance
The famous 19th-century linguist August Schleicher coined the slogan ‚Wenn wir nicht wissen, wie etwas geworden ist, so kennen wir es nicht’ – Unless we know how something came into being, we do not understand it.
In this tandem master class we will try to understand how grammatical items and categories develop in natural language. The case studies will be taken from the histories of the Germanic and Romance languages and cover phenomena from central grammatical areas such as tense, aspect, mood/modality, negation and sentence structure. To give an example: In Old and Middle High German texts, we can observe the rise of the periphrastic perfect of the type ‘haben’ + past participle: ‘Jemand hat einen Baum gepflanzt’. How does this new grammatical form arise? Is it a loan from Latin/Romance? If not, how come that both Germanic and Romance languages converged in this type of grammatical innovation? (see also Fr. ‘Quelqu'un a planté un arbre’ or En. ‘Someone has planted a tree').
The case studies will provide snapshots on the complexity of grammatical change and its underlying mechanisms (and thus vitiate Schleicher’s Darwinian view of language decay, of course). They will be discussed from different theoretical perspectives, formal and functionalist. The role of language contact and language acquisition in grammaticalization processes will also be addressed.
The diachrony of Romance
Ioanna Sitaridou
University of Cambridge
The syntactic evolution of the Romance languages
In this course we review and critically assess all the major foundational issues when discussing word order change from Latin to modern Romance; in particular, we discuss the nature of Vulgar Latin; word order and (non)configurationality in Latin; V2 versus non-V2 analyses of medieval Romance; and the encapsulation of information structure from past to present.
Readings
Batllori, M. and I. Sitaridou (2020). ‘Fronting in Old Spanish’. Glossa. 1-39
Sitaridou, I. (2019). ‘Against V2 in Old Spanish’ In: Breitbarth, Anne, Miriam Bouzouita, Melissa Farasyn, Lieven Danckaert (Eds.), The Determinants of Diachronic Stability. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 131-156
Sitaridou, I. (2015). ‘La anteposición de participio en español antiguo debida a la estructura de la información del discurso’. In: Marta López Izquierdo y Mónica Castillo Lluch (Eds.), El orden de palabras en español medieval. 111-140
Alboiu, G., Hill, V. & I. Sitaridou (2014). ‘Discourse Driven V-to-C in Early Modern Romanian’. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. 1057-1088
Eide, K. & I. Sitaridou (2014). ‘Contrastivity and information structure in the Old Ibero-Romance languages’. In K. Bech & K. Gunn Eide (eds.), Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 377-412
Sitaridou, I. (2012). ‘A comparative study of word order in Old Romance’. Folia Linguistica, 46/2, “The pace of Grammaticalisation in Romance”, (guest eds.) A. Carlier, B. Lamiroy & W. De Mulder). 553-604
Sitaridou, I. (2011). ‘Word order and information structure in Old Spanish’. Catalan Journal of Linguistics, Special issue on ‘Word Order and Information Structure’, (eds.) M. Battlori & M.-L. Hernanz. 159-184
Mathieu, E. and I. Sitaridou (2005). ‘Split wh-Constructions in Classical and Modern Greek: A Diachronic Perspective’. In Batllori, M., M.-L. Hernanz, C. Picallo, F. Roca (eds.), Grammaticalization and Parametric Variation. Oxford: OUP. 236-250
Tandem class by Katrin Axel-Tober and Sarah Dessì Schmid
University of Tübingen
How grammar is created and shaped: Grammaticalization processes in the histories of Germanic and Romance
The famous 19th-century linguist August Schleicher coined the slogan ‚Wenn wir nicht wissen, wie etwas geworden ist, so kennen wir es nicht’ – Unless we know how something came into being, we do not understand it.
In this tandem master class we will try to understand how grammatical items and categories develop in natural language. The case studies will be taken from the histories of the Germanic and Romance languages and cover phenomena from central grammatical areas such as tense, aspect, mood/modality, negation and sentence structure. To give an example: In Old and Middle High German texts, we can observe the rise of the periphrastic perfect of the type ‘haben’ + past participle: ‘Jemand hat einen Baum gepflanzt’. How does this new grammatical form arise? Is it a loan from Latin/Romance? If not, how come that both Germanic and Romance languages converged in this type of grammatical innovation? (see also Fr. ‘Quelqu'un a planté un arbre’ or En. ‘Someone has planted a tree').
The case studies will provide snapshots on the complexity of grammatical change and its underlying mechanisms (and thus vitiate Schleicher’s Darwinian view of language decay, of course). They will be discussed from different theoretical perspectives, formal and functionalist. The role of language contact and language acquisition in grammaticalization processes will also be addressed.
Adina Dragomirescu
University of Bucharest
The diachrony of Romance: The view from Romanian
This class had three main goals:
1. Answering the question why is not old Romanian so old as the other Old Romance languages.
For this goal, I will shortly present the periodization of Romanian (in comparison to other Romance varieties), and the main types of text available for the study of the old period (1500-1780).
2. Answering the question why Romanian is no longer a ‘Cinderella’ among the Romance languages. In order to do that, I will present the recent literature, in English, related to Romanian (GR, SOR, OHR) or related to the Romance languages, but where Romanian has a special place.
3. Presenting the main syntactic features of old Romanian, teasing out the Romance features, the Balkan features and the features specific to Romanian, which are neither Romance, nor Balkan.
4. Revealing old Romanian as an unknown source for the study of the changes that happened in the setting of the head parameter. Although the passage from head-final to head-initial is a well-known phenomenon for Latin and the Romance Languages (Ledgeway 2013), it has been only sporadically mentioned for Old Church Slavonic (OCS) and the Slavonic languages (Pancheva 2008, Migdalsky 2018). As a Romance language strongly influenced by OCS, old Romanian interestingly mirrors this change in the head parameter that seems to also characterize OCS, if not maybe all the languages in the area.
Selected references
The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics, 2022, ed. Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, 2016, ed. Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, 2011/2013, ed. Martin Maiden, John Charles Smith, Adam Ledgeway, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Ledgeway, Adam, 2013, From Latin to Romance. Morphosyntactic Typology and Change, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
GR 2013 – Gabriela Pană Dindelegan (ed.), The Grammar of Romanian, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
SOR 2016 – Gabriela Pană Dindelegan (ed.), The Syntax of Old Romanian, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
OHR 2022 – Martin Maiden, Adina Dragomirescu, Gabriela Pană Dindelegan, Oana Uță Bărbulescu, Rodica Zafiu, The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Pancheva, Roumyana, 2008, ‘Head-directionality of TP in Old Church Slavonic’, in: A. Antonenko, J. Bailyn, C. Bethin (eds), Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Stony Brook Meeting, 2007. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 2008, 313‒332.
Migdalsky, Krzysztof, 2018, ‘Head directionality in Old Slavic’, in: D. Lenertová, R. Meyer, R. Šimík, L. Szucsich (eds), Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2016, 241–263, Berlin, Language Science Press.
Comparative and Contrastive Diachronic Linguistics
Vassilios Spyropoulos
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Pronominal clitic placement in Greek: Typology, variation, and diachronic development
In this course we will examine the pronominal clitic placement patterns in Greek. We identify three patterns: (a) a strictly encliticization pattern, attested in Pontic; (b) a second-position pattern, attested in the so-called South-Eastern dialects, e.g., Cypriot, Dodecanesian, Cretan, and the rest of the Asia Minor Greek varieties, e.g., Cappadocian, Silliot, Pharasiot; and (c) an adverbal pattern, attested in Standard Modern Greek and the rest of the dialects. We will discuss the typological properties of these patterns in comparison to similar patterns attested in other languages, such as Slavic and Romance. We will show that the second position pattern and the adverbal pattern are historically related to each other, as the latter developed out of the former by means of a (prosodic) reanalysis, and we will attempt to sketch the path of the diachronic developments in Greek pronominal clitic placement from the post-Classical period onwards (3rd c. BC – today).
Antonio R. Revuelta Puigdollers
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
A short introduction to comparative clauses (of equality)
The purpose of this lecture is to provide an introduction to comparative clauses in Greek (both Ancient and Modern) and other languages (mainly English, German and Spanish). The lecture will take into account (i) the entity modified by the clause (NP, Adverb, Adjective or clause) and (ii) the layered structure of the clause (Dik & Hengeveld). Prospective atttendees do not need any previous knowledge of Ancient or Modern Greek.
Dik, S. C. & Kees Hengeveld (1997) The Theory of functional grammar. Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1997.
Chapters 5 (argument), 9 (satellites 1-2), 12 (satellites 3-4)
Dik, Simon C.-Kees Hengeveld-Elscline Vester-CO Vet (1990) "The hierarchical structure of the clause and the typology of satellites", in: Nuyts-Bolkestein-Vet (eds.), Layers and levels of representation in Language theory. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 25-70.
Revuelta Puigdollers, A.R. (2015) “(In)equality Comparison in Modern Greek”. Selected Papers of the 11th International Conference on Greek Linguistics, G. Kotzoglou et al. (eds), 2014, 1483-1494. Rhodes: University of the Aegean, 2015.
Revuelta Puigdollers, A.R. (2020): 26. Las oraciones comparativas. MªDolores Jiménez López (coord.): Sintaxis del griego antiguo. CSIC: Madrid, pp. 941-972., 2020
Alexandru Nicolae
University of Bucharest
Basic notions in comparative and contrastive syntax
Major parameters of linguistic variation.
The goal of this class is to introduce the main concepts and tools employed to carry out research in comparative linguistics (with a focus on syntax), and to concentrate on the framework that generative grammar employs to analyse linguistic variation: parameters. Employing linguistic parameters represents a coherent framework that can lead to fruitful results in understanding differences both between languages, and between different stages of the same language, therefore it is an appropriate manner to carry out research in comparative and contrastive linguistics from a diachronic and synchronic point of view.
Main objectives of the class include:
(a) basic notions in comparative and contrastive syntax;
(b) methods of analysis in comparative syntax;
(c) major parameters of linguistic variation;
(d) parameter hierarchies.
Selected references
Biberauer, Theresa (ed.). 2008. The Limits of Syntactic Variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Chomsky, Noam. 1986, Knowledge of Language. Westport/Connecticut/London: Praeger.
Cinque, Guglielmo, Richard S. Kayne (eds.). 2005. The Oxford Hanbook of Comparative Syntax. New York: Oxford University Press.
Haspelmath, Martin, 2019, ‘Can cross-linguistic regularities be explained by constraints on change?’, in Explanation in typology: Diachronic sources, functional motivations and the nature of the evidence. Berlin: Language Science Press (Conceptual Foundations of Language Science, 3), pp. 1–23.
Kayne, R. S. 2000. Microparametric syntax [chapter 1]. Parameters and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3-9.
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2005. Possible and Probable Languages. A Generative Perspective on Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roberts, Ian. 2012. Macroparameters and Minimalism. A Programme for Comparative Research, in Parameter Theory and Language Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 320-335.
Roberts, Ian. 2019. Parameter Hierarchies and Universal Grammar. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, <https://academic.oup.com/book/38726> (27 April 2023).
Smith, N. and Law, A. (2009) ‘On Parametric (and Non-Parametric) Variation’, Biolinguistics, 3(4), pp. 332–343. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8733.
Velupillai, V. (2012) An Introduction to Linguistic Typology, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
The diachrony of English
Thórhallur Eythórsson
University of Iceland
English in a comparative Germanic approach
This course provides an introductory look at the linguistic connections between English and other Germanic languages, such as German and Icelandic. We'll explore the history of English, with an eye toward understanding its Germanic origins and how it has been shaped by influences from Latin and French. Our exploration takes us back to some of the earliest records of the Germanic languages, revealing a web of similarities and differences.
Highlights of the course include:
- Comparative studies of some of the basics of Old Norse, Gothic, Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old English.
- Discussions on the major similarities and differences within the Germanic language family.
- Close examination of select historical texts, with support from complete glossaries and detailed translations.
The course also introduces key topics like the pronunciation of ancient languages, mechanisms of linguistic change, techniques of linguistic reconstruction, and the impact of language contact and dialectal variation. This course is suited for anyone interested in linguistics, language history, or the evolution of English and its Germanic relatives.
Eva Zehentner
University of Zurich
Old and Middle English Morphosyntax
The lectures will provide insights into the morphological and syntactic systems of Old English and Middle English, with some additional information about lexis and semantics. Specifically, the first lecture will introduce students to the basic principles of Old and Middle English inflectional and derivational morphology, with a particular focus on categories of noun inflection such as case and gender, as well as verb inflection (e.g. strong vs weak verbs) and adjectival morphology. Regarding syntax, we will primarily discuss word order, agreement, and the use of periphrastic structures in both periods. Textual evidence will be drawn on to illustrate the morphosyntactic characteristics of the linguistic systems, enabling students to also get a glimpse of and appreciate the literary tradition of the time. The second lecture will then focus more explicitly on change between the periods, putting the changes observed (such as the loss of case marking, or the fixation of word order) into a larger context, and highlighting the role of both internal, cognitive factors as well as external pressures, specifically language contact, at play in these developments. This will allow students to gain a deeper understanding of how English came to be the way it is today.
New Perspectives in Studying Ancient and Medieval IE
Dag Haug
University of Oslo
The PROIEL corpora of old Indo-European languages
In these talks, I will present the PROIEL-family corpora of old Indo-European languages, which exist for a large variety of languages such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, Old Norse, Old English, and several Old Romance languages. All the corpora are annotated for morphology and syntax, and many of them also have other layers of annotation such as information structure, animacy, derivational morphology etc.
In these two lectures, I present the annotation principles and how they were applied in the different languages. There will be a hands-on session on how the annotation can be queried. I also discuss a few case studies of how the corpora were used in research.
Eckhoff, H., K. Bech, G. Bouma, K. Eide, D. Haug, O. E. Haugen, M. Jøhndal (2017), “The PROIEL treebank family: a standard for early attestations of Indo-European languages”, Language Resources and Evaluation. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10579-017-9388-5.
Haug, D. (2015) “Treebanks in historical linguistic research”, in Viti, C. (ed.) Perspectives on Historical Syntax, John Benjamins, p. 187–202.
Eckhoff, H. and D. Haug (2015) “Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic”, Diachronica 32-2, p. 186–230. https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.32.2.02eck
Olga Spevak
Toulouse University Jean Jaurès
Word order in Latin: Diachronic and typological considerations
This talk will deal with ‘free’ word order in Latin in comparison with ‘fixed’ word order in modern languages such as French or English. It will show pragmatic rules that are responsible for constituent ordering. Additionally, attention will be paid to diachrony and typology, in particular the shift from S(ubject)V(erb)Object to SOV in Classical Latin and then to SVO in Romance languages.
The noun phrase in Latin: Diachronic and typological considerations
This talk will be devoted to noun phrases in Latin, which allows quite free ordering of modifiers as well as discontinuity, i.e. separation from their head nouns. Flexibility of ordering of modifiers in Latin will be compared with the structure of the noun phrase with a fixed ordering such as French or English. Attention will be paid to the putative shift from G(enitive)N(oun) to N(oun)G(enitive) ordering in diachrony of Latin.
Francesca Dell’Oro
University of Neuchâtel
The diachronic evolution of modality and mood: cross-linguistic and corpus-based approaches
This lecture aims to provide an overview of the development of modality and mood from a cross-linguistic perspective, also employing a corpus-based approach to detect diachronic pathways in Latin and the Romance languages. The session is structured in two main parts. First, we introduce the concepts of ‘modality’ and ‘mood’, providing a state-of-the-art overview of their diachrony within a typological framework. We will discuss both common and less frequent diachronic pathways, illustrating how modality and mood develop at the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and how modal constructions can evolve into non-modal uses. The second part of the lecture focuses on practical applications, showcasing the WoPoss corpus, a richly annotated tool for investigating the diachrony of modality in Latin. This diachronic corpus enables precise queries concerning Latin modal markers and the reuse of results. Employing the WoPoss corpus, we will examine the evolution of the Latin modal system into those of Romance languages like Italian and French. The session not only highlights the theoretical implications of the investigation of modality and mood, but also demonstrates practical methodologies for linguists interested in combining historical linguistics and corpus methods.
