Events
Workshops, seminars, lectures, and conferences hosted or co-hosted by the lab
The lab organises and co-organises workshops and seminar series on language contact, diachronic linguistics, computational philology, and historical Indo-European linguistics. Past and upcoming events appear below.
Workshop, New Trends in Diachronic and Theoretical Linguistics (28 May 2026)
A one-day workshop with invited talks and young-researcher presentations, held at the Conference Room of the Library of the School of Philosophy, NKUA, as part of the MA Seminar series of the Programme in English Language, Linguistics, and Translation.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Date | Thursday, 28 May 2026 |
| Time | 12:00 to 18:00 |
| Venue | Conference Room next to the amphitheatre of the Library of the School of Philosophy, NKUA |
| Programme | Two invited lectures (12:15 and 13:15), light lunch (14:00), seven young-researcher talks (14:40 to 17:00), closing discussion (17:20 to 18:00) |
| Closing social | Workshop early dinner (18:30) and ice cream at Zografou |
Programme
| Time | Speaker | Item |
|---|---|---|
| 12:00 | Opening | Welcome and introduction |
| 12:15 | Invited talk: Adina Dragomirescu (University of Bucharest) | The Syntax of Istro-Romanian: Between Romance and Slavonic |
| 13:15 | Invited talk: Alexandru Nicolae (University of Bucharest) | The Syntax of Negation in Romanian from a Comparative Perspective |
| 14:00 | Light lunch | Light lunch |
| 14:40 | Maria Episkopou | Beowulf, its translations, and the diachronic importance of storytelling |
| 15:00 | Vassilis Symeonidis | Dynamic Complexity in Grammaticalization: A Corpus-Based Model of English Semi-Modals |
| 15:20 | Georgia Stavrianopoulou | From Abject to Subject: The Diachrony of Monstrous Frames in Fairytale Retellings |
| 15:40 | Anastasia Tsiropina | The diachrony of dative Object-Experiencer psych-verb constructions |
| 16:00 | Eleni Plakoutsi | Byzantine high and low registers: challenges for Early Medieval Greek studies |
| 16:20 | Sophia Chionidi | Computational Approaches to the Romance Influence on English Diachronic Morpho-Syntax: A Case of Historical Written Contact |
| 16:40 | Evangelos Argyropoulos Theodoropoulos | From Raw Text to Structured Linguistic Data |
| 17:20 | Closing discussion | Until 18:00 |
Invited talks
Adina Dragomirescu (University of Bucharest), The Syntax of Istro-Romanian: Between Romance and Slavonic. The talk examines the syntax of Istro-Romanian, an endangered Romance variety spoken in Istria, within the context of intense contact with the Cakavian dialect of Croatian. Its structural grammar represents a unique intersection between archaic Romance inheritance and Slavonic syntactic reinforcement. Features like interpolation and auxiliary inversion reveal a relaxed V2 grammar (a grammar with a verb-second word-order pattern in main clauses) where the verb moves to the C-domain. While contact with Croatian did not completely dictate these structures, it reinforced overlapping syntactic options that disappear in standard Romance languages.
Alexandru Nicolae (University of Bucharest), The Syntax of Negation in Romanian from a Comparative Perspective. The talk offers an overview of the negation system of Romanian, arguing that negation provides a reliable diagnostic for key aspects of clause structure. Romanian is of special interest because it displays strict negative concord (a pattern in which multiple negative elements in one clause jointly express a single semantic negation), preserves morphosyntactic distinctions among negative markers (clitic nu vs affixal ne-), and occupies a hybrid position at the intersection of Romance inheritance and Balkan areal convergence. The analysis combines synchronic and diachronic perspectives and situates Romanian within a comparative context, with emphasis on the Balkan Sprachbund (a linguistic area in which neighbouring languages share grammatical features through long-term contact).
Young-researcher contributions
Maria Episkopou, Beowulf, its translations, and the diachronic importance of storytelling. The presentation revolves around the language used in the epic of Beowulf and what it reveals about the era of both the original oral form and the manuscript. It also examines the role of kennings (compound poetic figures in Old English and Old Norse verse) and other special forms, asking how translators have diachronically dealt with such elements and what their choices may show.
Vassilis Symeonidis, Dynamic Complexity in Grammaticalization: A Corpus-Based Model of English Semi-Modals. The presentation examines how grammatical complexity changes over time during grammaticalisation (the historical process by which content words turn into grammatical markers) and introduces a corpus-based computational model of dynamic complexity.
Georgia Stavrianopoulou, From Abject to Subject: The Diachrony of Monstrous Frames in Fairytale Retellings. Drawing on Frame Theory (a cognitive-semantic framework in which the meaning of a word activates a structured background of related concepts) and fairytale studies, the presentation explores how contemporary retellings reframe monstrous figures as emotional beings and romantically desirable subjects.
Anastasia Tsiropina, The diachrony of dative Object-Experiencer psych-verb constructions. The study traces the development of dative object-experiencer psych-verbs (verbs that take an experiencer argument in the dative case rather than the nominative, such as Latin miseret me) in Greek diachrony, using historical retranslations of Ancient Greek drama and comparing the Greek findings with Modern English retranslations.
Eleni Plakoutsi, Byzantine high and low registers: challenges for Early Medieval Greek studies. The talk discusses the low prestige of Byzantine literature, the diglossia (the co-existence in one community of a high-register and a low-register variety of the same language) of the period, and the lack of reliable editions, and the problems these issues create for diachronic study.
Sophia Chionidi, Computational Approaches to the Romance Influence on English Diachronic Morpho-Syntax: A Case of Historical Written Contact. The talk examines written language contact in medieval England and discusses computational tools such as Python for extracting, cleaning, and visualising diachronic linguistic data.
Evangelos Argyropoulos Theodoropoulos, From Raw Text to Structured Linguistic Data. The presentation reports on interdisciplinary collaboration between linguistic analysis and computational implementation. The workflow involved cooperation with the lab's technical side, specifically through collaboration with Theodoros Michalareas. The workflow constantly moved between linguistic logic and computational structure: linguistic decisions often affected technical implementation, and technical constraints frequently influenced annotation and formatting decisions. In practice, the collaboration involved discussing workflow organisation, adapting notebook pipelines, testing XML outputs, debugging malformed structures, and gradually improving automation processes.
Upcoming events
Upcoming workshops, seminars, and lectures are announced on the News page and through the lab director's contact. To propose a talk or to be added to the lab's announcement list, write to nlavidas@enl.uoa.gr.