About

Scope, methods, history, contact

Scope

GlossaContactLab studies three intertwined research areas at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA).

Language contact

The lab investigates how languages affect each other under sustained bilingual, multilingual, and translation-driven conditions. The empirical focus runs from Indo-European antiquity (Greek-Latin contact in the Hellenistic and Roman periods; Greek-Slavic contact in late antiquity and Byzantium) through Modern Greek sociolinguistic settings.

Diachronic linguistics

The lab tracks systematic patterns of language change across three millennia of Greek. Recurring themes: argument-structure shift, voice + aspect realisation, perfect periphrasis, negation morphology, the case system, and the diachronic typology of information structure.

Computational philology

The lab builds open computational infrastructure for historical languages: dependency-parsed corpora under the PROIEL XML 2.0 schema; cross-lingual sentence- + word-level alignment via LaBSE + AwesomeAlign; syntactic-feature classification of diachronic stages via the LightSIDE-AthDGC fork; reception-graph navigation for influential canonical texts (Iliad reception, NT patristic reception, LXX retranslation chains).

Methods

The lab's working methods are:

  • PROIEL-strict annotation. Every annotated corpus the lab releases uses the PROIEL XML 2.0 schema (Haug & Johndal 2008; Eckhoff et al. 2018) - no CoNLL-U, no UD label leakage. The PROIEL relation inventory is pred / sub / obj / iobj / obl / atr / adv / voc / aux / xcomp / comp / xobj / nonsub / coord / pred-nom / apos / parpred / expl.
  • Open-access source chain. Source texts come from public-domain or open-licence archives (Perseus, Open Greek and Latin / First1K, SBL GNT, Rahlfs LXX, Papyri.info, Patrologia Graeca via Documenta Catholica Omnia, TITUS, Wulfila Project, GRETIL, SARIT, TEAMS, National Library of Ukraine). The annotation layer is original to the lab and released under CC-BY-4.0.
  • Reproducible tools. Every analysis pipeline ships as source code under Apache-2.0 (or BSD / GPL where upstream requires).
  • Lavidasised writing style. All public artefacts follow Prof. Lavidas's published academic voice: no em-dashes, no AI-marker vocabulary, NKUA affiliation block in its canonical form.

History

The lab grows out of Prof. Lavidas's research programme on the diachrony of Greek and language contact (see The Diachrony of Written Language Contact: A Contrastive Approach, Brill 2022; Studying Language Change in the 21st Century: Theory and Methodologies, eds. Lavidas & Nikiforidou, Brill 2022). The computational infrastructure that powers the lab's open releases is funded by HFRI Project No. 20577 + Greece 2.0 NRRP, with compute on GRNET ARIS.

Working Papers, digital edition

The lab self-publishes a continuously growing series of Working Papers. Each paper carries a citable identifier, an open licence, and a frozen Zenodo deposit. Authors are lab members or affiliates of the AthDGC research network.

Contact

Prof. Nikolaos Lavidas Director, GlossaContactLab National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), Division of Language-Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, School of Philosophy.

Email: nlavidas@enl.uoa.gr