AthDGC Laboratory for Diachronic Linguistics and Language Change
Language contact, diachronic linguistics, computational philology, at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
What the lab is
AthDGC Laboratory for Diachronic Linguistics and Language Change 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.