Descriptions are listed alphabetically by speaker. Each course title in the Program links directly to the corresponding entry below. Two descriptions are still awaited from their speakers and are marked accordingly.
In this master class, we explore how pragmatic markers which do not add to descriptions of the situation expressed by the proposition develop in natural language. We critically discuss pragmatic factors and the role of syntax and grammar in pragmaticalization, comparing it to processes of grammaticalization within formal linguistics. Furthermore, the course emphasizes empirical methodology: beyond traditional corpus studies, we discuss the role of psycholinguistic approaches in diachronic linguistics and investigate how language change can potentially be studied in a laboratory setting.
The discourse surrounding artificial intelligence in the humanities has largely organized itself around two inadequate positions: uncritical enthusiasm imported from Silicon Valley, and reflexive rejection rooted in effort-worship, attachment to intellectual property, and professional anxiety. These are not symmetrical errors, but they share a common premise: that “AI” names something coherent enough to indict or vindicate wholesale.
This paper argues that what the current debate lacks is not a “correct position” but a basic conceptual literacy: the capacity to distinguish between what these architectures make possible and what they have been made to do. The current state of what the layman understands as “artificial intelligence” is the result of decisions shaped by market logic rather than by the requirements of careful inquiry or ethical concerns.
Drawing on work in computational linguistics and the history of digital humanities infrastructure, the paper examines the continuity between earlier linear algebra approaches to semantic analysis, particularly Latent Semantic Indexing, and current transformer-based architectures. This continuity is largely suppressed in public debate, where “AI” functions as a folk category that obscures more than it reveals. Disaggregating the term, the paper argues, is a prerequisite for humanistic judgment.
The paper concludes by sketching a normative account of what it means for technology to be genuinely in the service of the humanities—a more demanding standard than either enthusiasm or rejection currently require.
Title and abstract forthcoming.
Transcribing historical texts has proved to be challenging across various fields. OCR technology was invented to accelerate the process of textual digitization; however, it also entails shortcomings in terms of character recognition, especially in poor quality images and handwritten texts. We discuss alternative ways of digitizing diachronic texts in the context of the AthDGC project, with a special focus on using AI-powered software, such as Google Lens.
The lectures outline the diachronic pathways of modality in a cross-linguistic perspective as well as some computational approaches to the study of modality, including corpora, databases, and manual and automatic annotation of modal markers.
This course provides an introductory look at the linguistic connections between English and other Germanic languages, such as German and Icelandic. We explore the history of English with an eye toward understanding its Germanic origins and how it has been shaped by influences from Latin and French, going back to some of the earliest records of the Germanic languages. Highlights include comparative studies of Old Norse, Gothic, Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old English; discussions of the major similarities and differences within the Germanic language family; close examination of select historical texts with complete glossaries and detailed translations; and coverage of key topics such as the pronunciation of ancient languages, mechanisms of linguistic change, techniques of linguistic reconstruction, and the impact of language contact and dialectal variation.
This course presents a theoretical and comparative approach to the analysis of changes affecting the expression of negation across languages. We survey a taxonomy of the lexical means and syntactic patterns used to express negation from a cross-linguistic perspective, and we explore widely attested cyclical diachronic phenomena, with particular attention to Indo-European languages and, especially, to the comparative diachrony of Latin-Romance and Greek.
This course introduces the mathematical and computational methods that have made phylogenetics a productive tool in historical linguistics over the past two decades. Topics covered include sequence comparison and automated cognate detection, probabilistic models of lexical change (continuous-time Markov chains), and Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Landmark case studies, including the Indo-European origin debate and large-scale global lexical distance analyses, illustrate both the reach and the limitations of these methods. Hands-on sessions give participants direct experience with the main software tools (LingPy, MrBayes) and standard cross-linguistic databases (Lexibank, Glottolog).
This course surveys the current state of diachronic linguistics, mapping the intersection of theoretical syntax and computational corpus methods. We examine how large-scale digital corpora, machine-learning tools, and cross-linguistic databases have transformed the questions we ask about morpho-syntactic change, contact-induced variation, and language evolution. The course closes with a prospective discussion of where the discipline is heading, with particular attention to the integration of formal and computational approaches in future research agendas.
This course, which considers language change from a functional-cognitive perspective, offers an introduction to the field of diachronic pragmatics, a subfield of historical pragmatics that aims to explain the rise of pragmatic markers. We concentrate on discourse markers (DMs) and, to a lesser extent, on modal particles (MPs), with a semasiological focus. We begin by defining pragmatic markers more generally and subsequently define discourse markers in contrast to modal particles, discussing different types of meaning found in language and their relevance to DMs and MPs. At the level of diachrony, we discuss the main pathways, mechanisms, and motivations of change: pathways include grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, and lexicalization as “macro-paths”, and loss of truth-conditional content, (inter)subjectivization, and increased focus on the speech event as particularly important “meso-paths”. With respect to mechanisms, we concentrate on reanalysis, metonymy, metaphor, and cooptation, with emphasis on the role of context types in triggering change. We pay special attention to linear vs. non-linear (including cyclical) developments and what the latter can tell us about language change more broadly.
This class provides an introduction to case syncretism in Ancient Greek. The first part focuses on relevant theoretical aspects of case syncretism. In the second part, the syncretic processes that occurred in the diachrony of Greek are analyzed in comparison with those of other ancient Indo-European languages, especially Old Persian, in order to enhance the comprehension of the phenomenon.
Digital Humanities have become one of the principal forces transforming contemporary humanistic scholarship, particularly in fields such as Classical Philology and Archaeology. In this lecture, they are understood primarily as the technologies, methods, and practices used to construct digital models of the traditional objects of study of the humanities. While these developments offer unprecedented opportunities for research, they also raise a series of methodological, epistemological, and cultural challenges. A common thread running through many of these challenges is the growing separation between models and the realities they are intended to represent.
The lecture will examine four manifestations of this phenomenon: the increasing autonomy of computational methods from humanistic questions; the emergence of a “Synthetic Antiquity” generated through AI-based reconstructions and synthetic data; the broader implications of Artificial Intelligence for the future of humanistic knowledge and intellectual autonomy; and the growing influence of political, institutional, economic, and ideological frameworks on Digital Humanities research. Rather than offering definitive solutions, the lecture aims to stimulate discussion about the future direction of Digital Humanities and the role that humanists should play in shaping their development.
In these two lectures, we examine in depth, from the perspectives of general linguistics and cognitive linguistics, the concepts of transitivity and the transitivity scale. We explore how the transitivity of a clause influences the marking of a verb’s arguments, how this marking has evolved historically throughout the history of Greek, and how corpus linguistics methodologies can be employed to investigate the phenomenon and its diachronic development.
In this talk, I discuss the advantages of Diamond Open Access (OA), a publishing model that does not charge fees to authors or readers and is directed by the research community rather than by commercial publishers. In the last ten years, many journals have moved to Diamond OA for a variety of reasons. I also discuss new initiatives that promote a broader set of Open Science principles, in particular Open Peer Review, and the new version of Open Research Europe (ORE) that will broaden no-fee publishing possibilities to researchers from 11 countries in Europe.
In this two-part lecture, I present fundamental ways of approaching the study of language change. I argue that language forecasting, that is, predictions about language in the future, offers a novel way of studying change over time. Using examples from Icelandic, I show how the propagation of language change may be predicted.
This course deals with the evolution and structure of the Romance varieties, which have descended from Latin and are spoken extensively in Europe, the Americas, and across the world. The course highlights major issues in the evolution of the Romance varieties ranging from philological to classificatory to phonological to sociolinguistic (language or dialect?) with a special emphasis on syntactic variation and evolution. The comparative analysis of the differences between Romance languages and between Romance and Latin departs from solid empirical descriptions coupled with linguistic theory. By completion of the course, students should have gained: (a) knowledge of the differences between Romance varieties including Old Romance; (b) an understanding of key issues in the evolution of the Romance languages; (c) an insight into a range of related issues pertaining to taxonomy, acquisition, and historical sociolinguistics; (d) familiarity with key explanatory concepts of historical linguistics such as grammaticalization and reanalysis.
Sri Lanka Afro-Portuguese is an endangered, Portuguese-based creole linked to the Afro-Sri Lankan community, whose presence on the island dates back to the Portuguese colonial period. Drawing on field-based research, this lecture asks how such a largely oral variety can be reconstructed, and what the limits of the surviving record mean for recovering its African roots.
In this course, we go through the basics of computational modeling of semantic change and provide a hands-on tutorial for testing and implementing research questions of your own. If time permits, we will cover both a lexicographic use case and onomasiological change.
Lecture 1: On the diachrony of indefinites, at least. The first lecture focuses on how elements that elsewhere in the language mean ‘at least’ can turn into components of indefinite pronouns.
Lecture 2: On the diachrony of indefinites, a map with more semantics. The second lecture revisits the Haspelmath (1997) semantic map for indefinite pronouns and argues that its explanatory potential for both synchrony and diachrony increases if we enrich the map semantically.
In these lectures I review data that support the cyclical model of language change and those that are less straightforward. Several cyclical developments are covered: negative cycles, the demonstrative cycle, the renewal of continuative expressions such as STILL (the continuative cycle), the renewal of intensifiers, and that of interrogative markers. I close with a discussion of the pros and cons of calling them cycles.
When we have a possible reanalysis potentially leading to the grammaticalization of a novel form, do we expect such a change to happen faster in a small speaker community or in a large one? Would a relatively isolated area (such as a peripheral dialect) be expected to be more conservative or more innovative? Questions like these have been answered heuristically in historical linguistics, leading to some common wisdom in the field. However, what if we could answer them in a more precise way? Such answers become possible if we start employing the tools of “evolutionary mathematics”: mathematical models originally developed to study biological evolution but frequently general enough to apply to linguistic cases as well. In this class, I gradually and gently introduce some of the tools from this “evolutionary toolbox” and demonstrate how we can use them to get nuanced answers about the dynamics of language change.