Online Spring Week
from Monday, April 7 to Thursday, April 10
11:30-20:00 (EEST)
*Other timezones - more analytically below:
CEST: 10:30-19:00 [Paris, Madrid, Rome, Stockholm, Brussels, Berlin, Bern]
WEST: 9:30-18:00 [London, Edinburgh, Dublin]
**Students must attend at least 50% of the lectures and write down their questions about the lectures on an electronic form provided by us.
Timezones
|
EEST [Athens, Bucharest] |
CEST [Paris, Madrid, Rome, Stockholm, Brussels, Berlin, Bern] |
WEST [London, Edinburg, Dublin] |
|
11:30 - 13:30 |
10:30 - 12:30 |
9:30 - 11:30 |
|
14:30 - 15:30 |
13:30 - 14:30 |
12:30 - 13:30 |
|
17:00 - 18:30 |
16:00 - 17:30 |
15:00 - 16:30 |
|
18:30 - 20:00 |
17:30 - 19:00 |
16:30 - 18:00 |
Lectures - Short description
Nikolaos Lavidas
Title: Historical linguistics and diachronic corpora: An Introduction
Short description:
A discussion of fundamental methodological approaches for studying language change through diachronic corpora. The lecture examines how diachronic corpora serve as valuable tools for analyzing linguistic changes across different levels (morphological, syntactic, semantic) and time periods. Additionally, it introduces modern methods for analyzing and processing diachronic data, with emphasis on their application to the study of Indo-European from its ancient to contemporary form.
Nikolaos Lavidas, Vassilis Symeonidis, Sofia Chionidi, Eleni Plakoutsi, Anastasia Tsiropina (Athens) [14:30 - 15:30]
Title: Historical linguistics and diachronic corpora: An Introduction. Working with historical and diachronic corpora
Short description:
This course will introduce participants into the use of quantitative (computational and statistical) methods in the diachronic study of language. Specifically, we will look at certain quantitative measures and tests frequently employed in Corpus Linguistics (lexical diversity and association measures), as well as some preliminary statistical notions (absolute and relative frequency, mean, standard deviation), which are essential for a reliable empirical (usage-based) linguistic analysis.
Luba Nikolova Vesselinova
Title: The evolution of negation examined via two cyclical models: Jespersen vs. Croft
Short description:
Negation is one of the few demonstrably universal features of human languages. As such the pathways for its development are highly interesting. In this talk I examine two different models that are commonly evoked when the evolution of negation is discussed. One is dubbed Jespersen Cycle, the other was proposed by William Croft in the early 1990s and goes under the name The Negative Existential Cycle. After reviewing each of them in detail, I conclude the lecture with a discussion of their differences and similarities and how they contribute to our understanding of the evolution of negation.
Jesus Federico Polo Arrondo
Title: Grammaticalization of adverbial subordinators: from Time to Cause (gr. ἐπεί, lat. cum, spn. pues, eng. since)
Short description:
The aim of this class is to study the change that the conjunction ἐπεί (epeí) undergoes in ancient Greek: from a temporal subordinating conjunction ('after that') to a causal subordinating conjunction ('because'). The process of diachronic change will be studied as a case of grammaticalization and will be compared with that of other conjunctions in Latin and other modern languages.
Tamara Bouso (tamara.bouso.rivas@usc.es) - University of Santiago de Compostela
Title: A Diachronic Construction Grammar Approach to the English Superlative Objoid Construction
Short description:
This lecture will start with a brief overview of a theory of linguistic knowledge known as Construction Grammar, paying attention to its emergence in the late 1980s, the main tenets of constructionist approaches that developed right afterwards, and the application of these postulates to the study of language variation and change. This overview aims at showing how Construction Grammar can help us to get a better understanding of the nature and historical development of the idiosyncratic properties of a number of syntactic patterns involving non-prototypical object types. Examples of these object types (objoids) are: (i) the way-object in the now well-known way-construction, as in She giggled her way up the stairs, where the subject referent moves along a path towards a specified goal (up the stairs), (ii) the reaction object in the so-called Reaction Object Construction (e.g. She smiled disbelief), where an intransitive verb (smile) is followed by a Noun Phrase that expresses an emotion of some kind (disbelief) such that the whole syntactic unit acquires the extended meaning “express X by V-ing” (i.e. “She expresses disbelief by smiling” in the example just given), and (iii) the superlative object, in a pattern that I refer to as the Superlative Objoid Construction in examples like They work their hardest or She smiled her prettiest. The suitability of the framework as a tool for the descriptive and historical analysis of marginal constructions like the ones just mentioned, and of the English Superlative Objoid Construction in particular, will be illustrated with the results obtained from a corpus-based study on the recent history of the construction (Bouso 2024; Bouso and Hundt 2023).
References
Bouso, Tamara. 2024. ‘Towards a Usage-Based Characterisation of the English Superlative Object Construction’. Constructions and Frames, February. https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.22020.bou.
Bouso, Tamara, and Marianne Hundt. 2023. ‘They Worked Their Hardest on the Construction’s History: Superlative Objoid Constructions in Late Modern American English’. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, February. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2022-0088.
María Isabel Jiménez
Title: (Metaphorical) Verb-nominal collocations in diachrony: From Latin to the Romance languages
Short description:
The relationship between grammar and lexicon is especially relevant in a type of language expressions called ‘collocations’ -as smoothskin (Eng.), fare unatelefonata (It.) or vino tinto (Sp.)-, which, on the one hand, participate in grammar as they are completely inserted in sentences and condition their syntax; and, on the other hand, they are lexically restricted syntagms, that is, combinations of words that the speaker does not construct freely, but are prefabricated lexical pieces shared by the linguistic community, in which, given a term, another term already memorized is preferentially chosen.
Latin also has collocations. In fact, the most recent studies in this language show that Latin is a highly collocational language, unlike what the first approaches to this topic proposed in the 60s and 70s, that viewed these constructions from a stylistic point of view and interpreted them as typical of a careless and vulgar language. Specifically, what I would like to talk about in this course are Latin collocations in diachrony, first, within the Latin language, and thenbetween Latin and Romance languages, paying special attention to those that have a metaphorical value.
Olga Batiukova Belotserkovskaya (2 talks)
Title: Working with digital corpora without having any programming knowledge. A hands-on introduction to Sketch Engine
Short description:
Sketch Engine is a corpus query and management system that is very popular among linguists because of its wide coverage (it includes a broad variety of corpora in 108 languages) and its user-friendly interface, which allows performing sophisticated data analyses without having programming skills. This course is a hands-on introduction to the main Sketch Engine tools, focused specifically on parallel and time-stamped corpora.
Johann-Mattis List
Title:
Short description:
Computer-assisted language comparison bridges quantitative and qualitative approaches to historical and typological language comparison. The basic idea is to provide the underlying data of analyses in a format that can be read both by humans and machines, and then use dedicated workflows in which qualitative and quantitative analysis are done hand in hand. In the lecture, I will introduce the major idea of computer-assisted approaches to historical and typological language comparison and then provide some concrete examples, touching the annotation of etymological data and the interactive investigation of sound change processes in historical linguistics, as well as the investigation of cross-linguistic colexifications in linguistic typology.
Daniel Riaño
Title: History of Papyrology and the Vesuvius Challenge: How Artificial Intelligence Can Change the History of Classical Philology
Short description:
In this course, we will explore two closely related topics: the origins of papyrology and its most recent advances. Contrary to common belief, papyrology as a discipline did not begin in Egypt with the papyrological discoveries of the mid-19th century, but rather in the 18th century, in Naples under the rule of Charles of Bourbon, the future Charles III of Spain.
Papyrology has undergone enormous methodological and substantive progress over the past century, significantly reshaping our understanding of the historical evolution of the Greek language. Undoubtedly, various forms of Artificial Intelligence are set to transform Classical Philology, just as they will impact other Humanities disciplines. However, in the case of papyrology, this change is poised to radically alter the history of the field itself.
One of the key elements of this transformation could be the “Vesuvius Challenge,” an open competition aimed at reading the papyri from the Villa of the Papyri without the need to unroll them, and therefore without risking their destruction.
Before the lectures
- For Olga Batiukova Belotserkovskaya's lectures:
During the lecture you will be taught about the use of Sketch Engine, a corpus and management system. You can find attached some material related to the lecture. For those of you who will attend, it is recommended that you to go over material 1,2,3 from the following list:
1. Quick (2-minute) start guide to Sketch Engine:
https://www.sketchengine.eu/quick-start-guide/
2. Kilgarriff, A., P. Rychly, P. Smrz, D. Tugwell (2004): "The Sketch Engine", Proceedings of Euralex. Lorient, France, July: 105-116.
3. Kilgarriff, A., V. Baisa, J. Bušta, M. Jakubíček, V. Kovář, J. Michelfeit, P. Rychlý, V. Suchomel (2014): “The Sketch Engine: ten years on”, Lexicography, 1: 7-36.
4. Morphosyntactic TreeTagger labels.
5. PowerPoint slides.
6. Two texts (English and Spanish) on human cloning.
The rest of the material will be used on the day of the lecture, you only need to download it.
It would also be very convenient if you could register to Sketch Engine before the sessions. You can start trying the Institutional login in https://auth.sketchengine.eu/#login, but if your home university does not have a license you can register for a free 30-day trial: https://auth.sketchengine.eu/#register/form?form=trial
