Upcoming events
Event Information:
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Tue09Dec202511:00 amBlandijn, Faculteitszaal
Gina Saviano (Ghent University) – "Mapping the Regional Linguistic Space between Italian and Dialect: A Computational Analysis of Phonetic Features in Neapolitan"
Show contentAbstract
“Continuum con addensamenti”, ‘continuum with agglomerations’: this is how Berruto once described the Italian linguistic repertoire. Much has been discussed about the extremes of this continuum; however, little do we know about those intermediate “agglomerations”. How many are there? How are they organized? Do they share features? To address these questions, we adopt a phonetic perspective and borrow a technique typically used in commercial profiling. Examining established Neapolitan phonetic features alongside new prosodic parameters, we identify possible speaker profiles and features agglomerations, shedding a new light on the intermediate varieties of the Italian standard-dialect continuum. In this talk, I will discuss preliminary studies and findings, applying this innovative methodology to offer new insights into the nature of the concept of variety.
Past events
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Tue29Nov20165:00 pmBlandijn, Grote Vergaderzaal (3de verdieping)
A Morphosyntactic and Semantic Analysis of the Augment Use and Absence in the Oldest Greek Literary Texts (1300-400 BC)
Show contentDr. Filip De Decker: A Morphosyntactic and Semantic Analysis of the Augment Use and Absence in the Oldest Greek Literary Texts (1300-400 BC)
A Morphosyntactic and Semantic Analysis of the Augment Use and Absence in the Oldest Greek Literary Texts (1300-400 BC)
Dr Filip De DeckerIn Classical Philology and Indo-European linguistics, the term augment is used to refer to the prefix *e that is added to past tense forms of the indicative and is only attested in Indo-Iranian (stretching back until the 2 nd Millennium BC), Greek, Armenian (attested as of the 5 th century AD) and Phrygian (extinct language dating back to the 7 th century BC). In Classical Greek prose (5 th and 4 th century BC), this prefix is mandatory: lúomen means "we loosen" and elúomen "we loosened", but in the earliest Greek texts this marker was more often absent than not: it is almost completely missing in the Mycenaean prose tablets (13 th century BC) and the forms without augment are decidedly more numerous in epic Greek (written down beginning
of the 8 th century BC). For many scholars, the augment use in poetry is only metrically motivated, whereas other studies have focused on morphologic, syntactic and semantic factors, but an overall study has not been performed and most studies have been limited to Homer. My project intends to fill this void. In this presentation, I give an overview of previous scholarship, present preliminary findings (facts and figures, and rules and constraints
governing the augment use) on the augment in epic Greek (Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns) and will analyse some examples. After the Greek of epic, my research will proceed to the elegy and lyric poetry, inscriptions (prose inscriptions until the 5 th century BC and verse inscriptions), non-Attic prose (Herodotos) and the choral passages in Greek tragedy. In a final stage, a selection from the Alexandrinian and Imperial epicists will be analysed.