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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

  • Fri
    17
    Apr
    2026

    BantUGent/DiaLing research seminar with Tom Bossuyt on Conditional coding in ‘even (if)’ concessive conditionals: Bantu and beyond

    14uLokaal 3.30 - Camelot, Blandijn, Campus Boekentoren
  • Mon
    20
    Apr
    2026

    Annachiara Clementelli - The syntactic development of the Late Latin ablative gerund: a corpus-based analysis

    3:00 pmRoom 3.30 (Camelot), Blandijn
    Lecture

    The presentation explores the syntactic development of the ablative gerund in Late Latin. Adopting a functional-typological perspective, it investigates the construction’s degree of nominality and sententiality. The analysis is based on a corpus of 12 texts dating from the 3rd to the 6th century AD and focuses on two main issues: the relationship between prepositional and non-prepositional ablative gerunds in Late Latin, and the level of internal syntactic complexity of the non-prepositional ablative gerunds. The comparison between prepositional and non-prepositional ablative gerunds offers evidence for a low degree of nominality of the ablative gerund in Late Latin. At the same time, the analysis of internal syntactic complexity shows a high level of sententiality. Although the ongoing development is evident, the presence of prepositional ablative gerunds, still displaying a noun-like behavior, indicates that the syntactic development is still in progress and not yet concluded.

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