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 (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) schema; cross-lingual sentence- + word-level alignment via LaBSE (a multilingual sentence-embedding model that maps sentences from many languages into a common vector space) + AwesomeAlign (a word-alignment procedure that uses multilingual-BERT attention to match words across translations); syntactic-feature classification of diachronic stages via the LightSIDE (an open-source text-mining workbench developed at Carnegie Mellon)-AthDGC (the Lavidas-extension fork of LightSIDE that operates on syntactic features rather than only text features) 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 (the closed set of grammatical-relation labels the schema allows, e.g. sub, obj, obl, atr) 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 (the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, which permits reuse with credit).
- Reproducible tools. Every analysis workflow is released as source code under Apache-2.0 (a permissive open-source licence widely used for software) (or BSD / GPL where upstream requires).
- Consistent academic voice. All public artefacts follow the project style guide, with the NKUA affiliation block in its canonical form.
Laboratory information
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Founded | April 2024 |
| Official documentation | ΦΕΚ (Government Gazette) founding document; updated with new ΦΕΚ for regulatory compliance |
| Location | Room 929, 9th floor |
| Department | English Language and Literature |
| School | School of Philosophy |
| Institution | National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) |
| Campus | Zografou, 157 84 Athens, Greece |
| Director | Prof. Nikolaos Lavidas |
Laboratory objectives
The lab pursues six strategic objectives, defined in the founding ΦΕΚ and the regulatory update:
- Research and analysis. Support experimental research investigating cross-linguistic and cross-cultural identities in discourse during translation and interpretation, relating to social reality and how changes affect translation outcomes.
- Educational support. Serve as a hub for practical research and training for undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students in technological applications of translation and interpretation.
- Vulnerable groups support. Support educational work related to vulnerable social groups where translation and interpretation are essential survival prerequisites.
- Professional development. Develop training and educational activities (seminars, conferences, lectures) supporting the operation of Graduate Programs and undergraduate programs.
- Community engagement. Connect the University with Greek society through high-level scientific training for educators and specialists seeking development in cross-cultural understanding.
- Professional collaboration. Develop cooperation with associations and organisations to promote translation and interpretation issues.
Quality assurance and core research mission
The lab operates under strict quality-assurance policies covering research methodology, data integrity, collaborative partnerships, and educational outcomes. Its core research mission is to address fundamental questions about written language contact and its role in language evolution: how translation practices create contact situations that differ from spoken-language contact, the specific mechanisms through which written borrowing occurs, and the constraints that govern structural transfer in literary and religious texts. Method-wise, the lab develops procedures for identifying and analysing contact effects in historical corpora, with emphasis on separating genuine contact-induced change from translation interference, analysing retranslation patterns across centuries, and understanding how influential texts shape recipient-language syntax through sustained contact.
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 (the Greek national high-performance computing cluster, run by GRNET).
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 (an open research-data repository hosted at CERN that mints permanent DOIs) 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