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ΔiaLing

The research group ΔiaLing clusters scholars who conduct research in the field of historical and diatopic linguistics, and gives as such visibility to these fields of study. The research conducted by ΔiaLing contributes to these disciplines in the following ways:

(i) language description and documentation through the creation and dissemination of various types of descriptive tools that are of use to the linguistic community (e.g. dictionaries, grammars, corpora, text editions, databases, etc.);

(ii) the advancement of linguistic theory, which is informed by empirically-grounded studies.

A number of diverse theoretical viewpoints on language variation and change (e.g. Construction Grammar, Grammaticalization Theory, Relevance Theory, Prototype Theory, Dynamic Syntax, Cartography, Nanosyntax and, more generally, Generative Grammar) are explored for the genesis and development of a variety of phenomena. These include, among others, discourse markers and adverbs, aspect and modality, word order phenomena and information structure, transitivity alternations and valency, case-marking and argument structure, nominal constituents, adverbial clauses, negation and word formation.

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Calendar

  • Mon
    09
    Mar
    2026

    Jóhanna Barðdal (Ghent University) - "How to Reconstruct Case and Argument Structure for Inconsistent Correspondence Sets Across Daughter Languages"

    3:00 pmFaculteitszaal
    Lecture
    The verb 'suffice' in the Germanic languages is of major interest to syntactic reconstruction for several reasons. First, two different, but etymologically related, verbs exist in the early daughter languages with the meaning 'suffice', reconstructable as *ga-nahan and *ga-nōgjan. Second, major inconsistencies are found between the case and argument structure constructions across the two verbs and across the daughter languages, including Nom-Gen, Acc-only, Acc-Nom, Acc-Gen, Dat-Gen and Dat-Nom. These case frames are not particularly compatible with each other, severely limiting the chances of a successful reconstruction. A further scrutiny reveals that the younger verb may also occur as a ditransitive, which complicates matters even further. Here both verbs are reconstructed for Proto-Germanic with different case frames, including how the internal development may, or even must, have been in order for the two verbs and the different case and argument structure constructions to be reconcilable. This study also shows that the lexical semantic meanings range from 'satiate', 'endow' and 'satisfy' to 'be satisfied', 'find sufficient' and 'suffice', all depending on the relevant case and argument structure constructions, calling for a further investigation into the role of argument structure for semantic change with lexical verbs.
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  • Mon
    23
    Mar
    2026

    Didier Demolin (Université Sorbonne nouvelle, CNRS & Rhodes University Makhanda) & Francisco Mendes (Federal University of Brasilia) - "Acoustic features and grammatical structures of Muriqui vocalizations"

    3:00 pmBlandijn 2 3.30 (Camelot)
    Lecture

    Acoustic features and grammatical structures of Muriqui vocalizations

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  • Mon
    20
    Apr
    2026

    Annachiara Clementelli - t.b.a.

    3:00 pm
    Lecture

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