Archives: Events

Prof. Dr Michal Starke (Masaryk University): “Cutting French verbs and gluing them back together”.

Abstract: Descriptively, French has many “irregular” verbs, as well as a mildly complex combination of suffixes on verbs. I aim to show that both irregular verbs and the combination of verbal suffixes follow a regular underlying system, and that this system can be elegantly derived by using phrasal spellout, the elsewhere principle and the functional sequence provided by syntax.

ΔiaLing-presentation by Dr. Leonid Kulikov (UGent, ΔiaLing): “Gr. Κένταυρος and his (non-)Indo-European relatives: the Indo-Iranian myth of the primordial incest between twins (Yamī and Yama) and its origins.”

DiaLing presentation by Prof. Dr. Carme Silva Domínguez (University of Santiago de Compostela): “The Evolution of Possessive Pronouns: Forms and Structures from Latin to Modern Galician and Portuguese.”

Abstract: This presentation offers a comparison between possessive pronouns in three varieties proceeding from LAtin: Medieval Galician-Portuguese, Modern Galician and Modern Portuguese. First of all we will explain the morphological evolution of the paradigm through the examination of the main evolutionary phenomena which allow us to contrast the ancient and modern languages. After that we will deal with the constructive changes in the possessive structures: among them, the combination with article, placement strategies and evolution beyond the noun phrase. In addition, the syntactic behavior of the possessive seems to be different in Galician and in Portuguese, although further research about non normative varieties is needed.

Prof. André Motingea Mangulu (UPN Kinshasa) will give a talk with the title “Particularités des langues mongo parlées par les groupes d’anciens chasseurs-collecteurs du bassin central congolais : Une contribution à la linguistique historique et à l’histoire des migrations.”

After that, there will be a BantuFirst research pitch on “Dorsal fricatives in West Coastal Bantu: substrate interference from extinct hunter- gatherer languages?”, presented by Dr Sara Pacchiarotti.

The following colleagues will present (themselves and) their projects:

• Giuseppe Magistro (FWO): Prosodic cues to syntactic reanalysis. Experimentally tracking Jespersen’s cycle in progress
• Antoine Primerano (FWO): The grammaticalisation of the future and conditionals in the history of Ibero-Romance: a language and dialect contact approach
• André Kött (BOF): Groeten uit het verleden: over het gebruik van interjecties in meertalige vroegmoderne taalmethodes
• Ezra la Roi (FWO): Counterfactuals in the History of Greek: An Enriched Diachronic Typology using a Context-Sensitive Evolutionary Model

Abstract

In my talk, I will discuss my planned research on the Development of Dutch Orthography and I hope to exchange ideas on Data Enrichment for the first stage of the project. This first stage will take place within a research visit at Gent University.

The main scope of the project proposed here is the description of unguided (not-steered) development of writing systems for West Germanic dialects based on the Latin alphabet. It will render this from diatopic and diachronic grapheme research on Middle Dutch local charters.

Dutch diachronic orthography research has been the focus of research in the last decennium, however mostly focusing on Early Modern Dutch and later stages, and usually in the context of standardisation. That means it is limited to how orthographic development of a language operates within the parameters of a society that is aware of and pays lip service to a supra-regional, consciously and unconsciously superimposed or pursued variety. In my proposed research, I will focus on the period before Early Modern Dutch and the standardisation processes, and ask the question: “How do scribes cope in writing with the Latin alphabet in their dialects when there is no prescribed standard?”To answer this, the writings of scribes who operate in local writing systems, i.e. written dialect, need to be considered, and this should be done with manuscripts, e.g. handwritten administrative texts of local importance only, such as local charters.

Preliminary research suggests that in case of vowel grapheme systems, the aptness of singular graphemes is gradable and can be described in terms of the phonological distinctive features they may convey accurately (De Wulf 2019, in preparation). This stems from the fact that some graphemes are used to convey many more historical phonemes (i.e. West Germanic allophones) than others, and which graphemes these are, also varies from dialect to dialect. There is a clear indication that vowel grapheme systems in the Eastern dialects contain less accurate graphemes, since more of the historical vowel phonemes have in fact evolved into separate phonemes. My working hypothesis is that an implicational scale of phonological features can be established (per dialect or maybe more generally, dialect region), which means that certain features are to be prioritised in writing systems. This should be investigated for vowel as well as consonant graphemes.

The here proposed project will have to clarify whether this holds through for all types of graphemes, and whether this variety is maintained throughout medieval writing in the period 1250-1400.

As the main deliverable I will provide an open access and electronically published diachronic grapheme atlas with commentary.