Course Description
This seminar will provide an in-depth examination of current approaches to syntactic and semantic change, covering both theoretical and methodological issues. Historical syntax and semantics have become increasingly central to the study of language change; syntactic and semantic change have been shown to display systematic regularities which were not apparent at earlier stages of the field due to the lack of suitable theoretical and technical tools.
Nowadays, the analysis of syntactic and semantic change by means of a combination of formal and computational tools allows for a comparison between the triggers and the mechanisms that underlie processes of change affecting structure and meaning: is change in syntax and in semantics initiated under the same conditions and by the same factors? Does it develop along similar trajectories? How do form and meaning interact during change? Seeking answers to these questions can enhance our understanding not only of historical processes within and across linguistic communities, but also of the general architecture of the language faculty. Phenomena of systematicity and cyclicity observed in syntactic and semantic change shed light on the one hand on the determinants and limits of cross-linguistic variation, and on the other hand on the dynamics of communication that fuel change.
Area Tags: Syntax, Semantics, Diachrony, Historical, Linguistic Frameworks, Typology
(Session 1) Tuesday/Friday 3:00pm – 4:20pm
Location: ILC N400
Instructors: Patrícia Amaral & Chiara Gianollo
Patrícia Amaral is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University. She obtained her PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from The Ohio State University in 2007, and has held appointments at Stanford University, University of Liver-pool, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her main research areas are semantics/pragmatics and historical linguistics, with a particular focus on the Romance languages. She has published in journals like Diachronica, Probus, Linguistics and Philosophy, Linguistics, and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. She is the co-editor of Portuguese-Spanish interfaces: Diachrony, Synchrony, and Contact (John Benjamins, 2014).
Chiara Gianollo is Associate Professor of General and Historical Linguistics at the University of Bologna. She obtained her MA and PhD from the University of Pisa and has held appointments as lecturer and researcher at the Universities of Trieste, Konstanz, Stuttgart, and Cologne. Her main research areas are diachronic syntax and semantics, with specific focus on the use of formal theoretical linguistics to investigate the history of Greek, Latin, and Old Romance. She has recently published the monograph Indefinites between Latin and Romance (OUP, 2018).
