Tim Denecker: Linguistic and Cultural Education in Western Christianity (c.380–735): A study of the content, form, and sociocultural insertion of Latin language manuals
My postdoctoral research project aims to improve our understanding of the linguistic and cultural foundations for education in Late Antique and Early Medieval Western Christianity. In order to do so, it focuses on the corpus of Latin language manuals (grammatical, lexicographical and orthographical works) produced during the period between the manuals of Augustine (c.380) and Bede (d. 735). The project is based on the hypothesis that manuals play a key role in shaping a body of general and propaedeutic knowledge for a particular historical period, and that the language manuals at hand can accordingly be approached as major sources in assessing the status and level of linguistic and cultural knowledge in Late Antique and Early Medieval Western Christianity. More specifically, my research project investigates (1) the conceptual basis and structure of the language manuals in their relation to earlier (pagan and Christian) representatives in the tradition; (2) the formal organization of the linguistic and cultural knowledge the manuals transmit, from the perspective of special language studies (Fachtexte/Fachsprachen); and (3) the manuals’ insertion in their sociocultural context: whom do they teach and in which linguistic and sociocultural circumstances? From the perspective of historical sociolinguistics, the project looks in particular at the attitudes the manuals exhibit towards (a) the evolution of ‘Classical’ to ‘Late’ Latin, and (b) the bi- and multilingual settings in which they were conceived and used. In my presentation, I will deal in some more detail with my corpus, method and research questions, and illustrate all this by means of some first results.
Dr. 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 Decker
In 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.
“Leer je collega’s kennen”:
- Isabelle de Meyer: “Asia Minor as a Linguistic Area: Greek-Turkish-Armenian Language Contacts and the Anatolian Substrate”
- Joanne Stolk: “Scribal Corrections and Language Variation and Change in Greek Documentary Papyri from Egypt (300 BCE – 800 CE)”
- Francesca Cotugno: “A multidisciplinary analysis of non-literary Latin texts from Roman Britain”
- Mark Janse: voorstel HERA-project “MuMiL-EU: Multilingualism and Minority Languages in Ancient Europe”
Francesca Cotugno: voorstelling doctoraatsproject “A multidisciplinary analysis of non-literary Latin texts from Roman Britain”
Lecturer: Dr. Joel Wallenberg (Newcastle University)
In the past, the fields of historical linguistics and synchronic syntax have both largely relied on qualitative data, e.g. the analysis of isolated examples, qualitative judgment data, etc. In the last few years, however, successes in variationist sociolinguistics, quantitative biology, and computer science have begun a revolution in the way both syntax and language change are studied: both fields have begun to use more quantitative data, especially in finding theoretically important statistical patterns in naturalistic production data. These fields have also combined with each other and with quantitative methods to give rise to a new field of quantitative diachronic comparative syntax. However, studying syntactic change in this mathematical way, particularly in a cross-linguistic, comparative approach, presents a number of interesting technical challenges. It requires measuring the frequencies of very abstract objects over very large periods of time, and in order to do this, we need a research infrastructure of diachronic parsed corpora (i.e. treebanks) drawn from a number of language histories. Building and analyzing these treebanks requires considerable technical skill, and a fair amount of collaboration between linguists with various computational, theoretical, and philological skills. Our workshops this week will help students with some background in syntax begin to search parsed corpora of this kind, interpret the results, and if they’d like, help them to contribute to the process of building more diachronic corpora of more languages.
Dinsdag, 25 oktober 2016, 14.00u – 16.30u, PC-lokaal D (PlaRoz): over werken met geparsede corpora, bv. PPCHE en IcePaHC
Donderdag, 27 oktober 2016, 11.00u – 13.00u, Hiko b. 001: over het bouwen van een eigen corpus, het parsen van je eigen gegevens
Deze workshops zijn een initiatief van Prof. Dr. Miriam Bouzouita en Prof. Dr. Anne Breitbarth.
Lecturer: Dr. Joel Wallenberg (Newcastle University)
In the past, the fields of historical linguistics and synchronic syntax have both largely relied on qualitative data, e.g. the analysis of isolated examples, qualitative judgment data, etc. In the last few years, however, successes in variationist sociolinguistics, quantitative biology, and computer science have begun a revolution in the way both syntax and language change are studied: both fields have begun to use more quantitative data, especially in finding theoretically important statistical patterns in naturalistic production data. These fields have also combined with each other and with quantitative methods to give rise to a new field of quantitative diachronic comparative syntax. However, studying syntactic change in this mathematical way, particularly in a cross-linguistic, comparative approach, presents a number of interesting technical challenges. It requires measuring the frequencies of very abstract objects over very large periods of time, and in order to do this, we need a research infrastructure of diachronic parsed corpora (i.e. treebanks) drawn from a number of language histories. Building and analyzing these treebanks requires considerable technical skill, and a fair amount of collaboration between linguists with various computational, theoretical, and philological skills. Our workshops this week will help students with some background in syntax begin to search parsed corpora of this kind, interpret the results, and if they’d like, help them to contribute to the process of building more diachronic corpora of more languages.
Dinsdag, 25 oktober 2016, 14.00u – 16.30u, PC-lokaal D (PlaRoz): over werken met geparsede corpora, bv. PPCHE en IcePaHC
Donderdag, 27 oktober 2016, 11.00u – 13.00u, Hiko b. 001: over het bouwen van een eigen corpus, het parsen van je eigen gegevens
Deze workshops zijn een initiatief van Prof. Dr. Miriam Bouzouita en Prof. Dr. Anne Breitbarth.
Specialist course Argument structure and the dative. Case studies from Romance languages with special reference to Spanish.
Lecturer:
Prof. Dr. Chantal Melis (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
Specialist course Methods in building and exploiting parsed (historical) corpora.
Lecturers:
Prof. Dr. Giovanna Marotta (Università di Pisa): Historical Sociolinguistics and Latin Language. Data from Inscriptions and Tablets