GlossaContactLab
Language contact, diachronic linguistics, computational philology, at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
What the lab is
GlossaContactLab is a research initiative hosted at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), Division of Language-Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, School of Philosophy. The lab brings together work on:
- language contact, how languages affect each other under sustained bilingual or multilingual conditions, from Indo-European antiquity to the present;
- diachronic linguistics, the systematic study of language change across centuries and millennia, with Greek as the canonical reference language;
- computational philology, dependency-parsed historical corpora (PROIEL (the dependency-treebank (a collection of sentences whose grammatical structure has been analysed and stored) standard for early Indo-European languages, developed at Oslo) XML 2.0 (the file format that stores each sentence as a tree of word-by-word grammatical relations, developed at Oslo)), cross-lingual alignment (matching corresponding words or sentences between texts in different languages), syntactic-feature classification of diachronic stages.
The lab is led by Prof. Nikolaos Lavidas.
What we publish
| Series | Format | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Working Papers, digital edition | HTML + .docx | open-access pre-prints and platform launch reports from lab members and affiliates |
| Research outputs | data / code / corpora | open datasets, software, and dependency-parsed corpora released under permissive licences |
Featured platform
AthDGC, Athens Digital Glossa Chronos, the lab's flagship computational platform. PROIEL-XML 2.0 dependency-parsed treebank of the entire Greek language (Homeric through Modern), with verse-level cross-lingual alignment to Latin, Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, and Classical Armenian. v0.7 expands to Sanskrit, Old English, Avestan, Old Persian, and Ukrainian. Fourteen open-source modules. The launch report is Working Paper 01 of this series.
Affiliation block
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), Division of Language-Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, School of Philosophy.
Contact: nlavidas@enl.uoa.gr.
Funding
Funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI) under the 3rd Call for HFRI Research Projects to support Post-Doctoral Researchers, Project No. 20577; with complementary support from the Greece 2.0 National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Compute via GRNET ARIS (the Greek national high-performance computing cluster, run by GRNET) (Greek national HPC (high-performance computing, i.e. a cluster of fast machines used for heavy computation)), allocation pa260305. Project: CVL-CDSAML, A Corpus-based Valency (the number and type of arguments a verb takes) Lexicon for a Contrastive and Diachronic Study of Ancient and Medieval Languages.