Diachronic Linguistics in the 21st century

Explore modern methodologies of studying language change and advance your knowledge on the study of ancient and medieval languages

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CIVIS focus area
Society, culture, heritage
Open to
  • Bachelor's
  • Master's
  • Phd
  • PhD candidates/students
Field of studies
  • Social Science and humanities
Type
  • Blended Intensive Programmes (BIP)
Course dates
7 April 2025 - 25 July 2025

This CIVIS Blended Intensive Programme will introduce participating students to an interdisciplinary way of studying the development of languages, focusing on ancient and medieval European languages and on a contrastive approach.

Students will acquire advanced knowledge of the modern theoretical approaches to the study of ancient and medieval languages, both in relation to the analysis of their grammar and to the examination of the correlations between society (for instance, in the cases of language contact), culture and linguistic development.

Moreover, students will be involved in small linguistic and computational historical linguistic projects that aim to build advanced knowledge of the methodology of describing, analysing and explaining the grammar and the development of ancient and medieval languages.

This CIVIS Blended Intensive Programme includes an introduction to the methodology of computational and statistical analysis of language change and the challenges of linking digital heritage data with historical linguistic studies.

Main topics addressed

The program provides to the students knowledge related to the following fields:

  • Computational historical linguistic analyses: “From texts to grammar”
  • New methodologies of describing, analyzing and explaining language change, the grammar and the development of ancient and medieval languages
  • Modern theoretical approaches to the study of language change

Learning outcomes

Upon completion of the course, the students will:

Will acquire advanced knowledge of the modern descriptive and analytical approaches to the study of ancient and medieval languages, both in relation to the analysis of their grammar and to the examination of the correlations between society (for instance, in the case of language contact) and language change.

The students will also be introduced to the methodology of computational and statistical analysis of ancient and medieval Indo-European languages (mainly) and the challenges of linking digital heritage data with historical linguistic studies.

This CIVIS Blended Intensive Programme is devoted to the dissemination of the new approaches to the study of language change: modern linguistic theories in collaboration with technology and modern statistical analyses (historical computational linguistics and modern linguistic approaches as well as the perspective of digital heritage).

 

Dates: 7 April 2025 - 25 July 2025 Total workload: 180 hours
Format: Blended ECTS: 6*
Location: Naxos, Greece Language: English (B2)
Contact: nlavidas@enl.uoa.gr  

*Recognition of ECTS depends on your home university.

Physical mobility

The physical mobility part will be running from 21 to 25 July 2025 and will take place in Naxos, Greece.

Schedule of the physical part

This CIVIS course is a blended-learning programme that consists of an intensive online Spring School, online workshops and an intensive Summer School (40 hours of face-to-face classes) that will be held in Naxos, Greece during July 2025.

Selected students will be supported by a grant for physical mobility to Greece.

Virtual part

The virtual part will be running from 7 April to 30 June 2025.

Schedule of the virtual part

  • 7-11 April 2025: Linguistic and computational historical linguistic intensive classes, lectures and masterclasses aiming at an advanced knowledge of the methodology of describing, analyzing and explaining language change.
  • May - June 2025: Online workshops. Concrete dates to be announced. Small computational historical linguistic projects “From texts to grammar.”

Requirements

This course is open to Bachelor's and Master's and PhD students at CIVIS member universities with a background and a specific interest in the fields of Humanities, Historical / Diachronic Linguistics, Languages.

Moreover, in order to follow the course participants is desirable to have previous experience in Historical Corpora, Digital humanities and critical thinking.

NB: Visiting Students - Erasmus Funding Eligibility

To be eligible for your selected CIVIS programme, you must be a fully enrolled student at your CIVIS home university at the time you will be undertaking the programme. Click here to learn more about the eligibility criteria.

Students from CIVIS’ strategic partner universities in Africa cannot apply for participation in this course.

Application process

Send your application by filling in the online application form by 31 October 2024, including:

  • CV
  • Motivation letter (the reason behind the application for the BIP)
  • Level of English B2 (According to CEFR)

Apply now

Assessment

  • Advanced undergraduate students will have to complete small assignments (quizzes) and prepare a small researchessay - Alternative assessment: critical reviews or a research-based project or a poster presentation (or take a finalwritten exam).
  • Postgraduate students (MA and PhD) will have to present research findings in class, complete small assignments(quizzes) and prepare a research essay or:
  • Alternative assessment: critical reviews or a research-based project or a poster presentation (or take a final written exam).

Blended Intensive Programme

This CIVIS course is a Blended Intensive Programme (BIP): a new format of Erasmus+ mobility which combines online teaching with a short trip to another campus to learn alongside students and professors across Europe. Click here to learn more about CIVIS BIPs.

Learn more about this CIVIS course here! 

GDPR Consent

The CIVIS alliance and its member universities will treat the information you provide with respect. Please refer to our privacy policy for more information on our privacy practices. By applying to this course you agree that we may process your information in accordance with these terms.

  • Nikolaos Lavidas is Associate Professor of Diachronic Linguistics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Department of Language-Linguistics, Faculty of English, School of Philosophy). His research covers a range of topics associated with Indo-European historical linguistics and the directions of language change (in particular the development of transitivity and voice in Indo-European languages), syntax-semantics interface, (historical) language contact and historical corpora.
  • Antonio R. Revuelta Puigdollers is Associate Professor of Ancient and Modern Greek at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and a sworn translator of Modern Greek. His main research areas are the semantics, syntax and pragmatics of Greek; his work also includes incursions into other languages such as Latin. He is the co-author of a new syntax of Ancient Greek and has authored several entries in Brill’s Encyclopaedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics.
  • Katrin Axel-Tober is Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research focuses on the synchronic and diachronic syntax of German. She has published the books Studies on Old High German Syntax: Left Sentence Periphery, Verb Placement and Verb-Second (Benjamins, 2007) and (Nicht-)kanonische Nebensätze im Deutschen: Synchrone und diachrone Aspekte (Walter de Gruyter, 2012) as well as several articles on sentence structure, complementizers, null subjects, and modal verbs.
  • Artemij Keidan is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Italian Institute of Oriental Studies, Sapienza Università di Roma. His main areas of expertise include the history of grammatical thought, Indo-European morphology, philosophy of language, and issues in syntax and phonology, both general and applied to ancient (such as Sanskrit, Latin, Gothic, Slavic languages) and modern languages.
  • Flavia Pompeo is Associate Professor of Historical and General Linguistics at the Department of Letters and modern Cultures (Dipartimento di Lettere e Culture moderne), Sapienza Università di Roma. Her research interests focus on historical linguistics, historical sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics, and, in particular, on topics regarding the morphosyntax and semantics of Ancient Greek and Old Iranian.
  • Joanna Kopaczyk is Professor in Scots and English (English Language & Linguistics) at the University of Glasgow. She is a historical linguist with a special interest in the medieval and early modern history of the Scots language. She uses corpus-driven methods to uncover textual standardisation and she is also interested in formulaicity in language, as revealed through all kinds of repetitive patterns. She has recently co-edited books on Applications of Pattern-Driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics (John Benjamins, 2018) and on Binomials in the History of English (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
  • Adina Dragomirescu is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bucharest (Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters) and Senior Researcher at (as well as and head of) the “Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” Institute of Linguistics (Romanian Academy). Her main research areas are Romanian and Romance Syntax, historical syntax, and language contact. She wrote two single-authored books (on unaccusative verbs in Romanian, and on the Romanian supine), and she contributed to collective works such as: The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology (2021), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (2016), The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics (2022), The [Oxford] Grammar of Romanian (2013), The [Oxford] Syntax of old Romanian (2016).
  • Alexandru Nicolae is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bucharest (Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters) and Researcher at the “Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” Institute of Linguistics (Romanian Academy). His research focuses on comparative and diachronic linguistics, and covers a range of topics associated with Romanian, the Romance languages and the Balkan Sprachbund (e.g., grammaticalization, language contact, word order, definiteness, cliticization, genitives, etc.). Nicolae contributed to reference works like The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (2016), The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics (2022), The [Oxford] Grammar of Romanian (2013), The [Oxford] Syntax of old Romanian (2016), and published three single-authored monographs, two of which are devoted to word order change and other diachronic phenomena in Romanian.
  • Ljuba Veselinova is a Professor of Linguistics at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her main interests lie in linguistic typology, the shaping of grammar and lexicon via processes of grammaticalization and lexicalization, numerical concepts and their linguistic expressions, and cyclical processes in language change. She has done extensive work on exceptions to morphological patterns, e.g. suppletion, on negation, specifically, its lexical encoding and independence as a functional domain and also on the evolution of negation and lexical restructuring as a cyclical process. Another prominent direction in her research is language as a geographical phenomenon and the use of Geographical Information Systems for language studies and linguistic cartography. She is also interested in language documentation and description and the use of technology in these domains. She has contributed to projects such as the World Atlas of Language Structures (2005), ed, M. Haspelmath, M. Dryer, D. Gil, B. Comrie, Oxford University Press, and likewise the online edition, https://wals.info (2013), EMELD and LL-Map. As an MA student in the US, she was the first student editor of the LINGUIST List.
  • Matthias Heinz: Dean - Kulturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät - Paris Lodron University of Salzburg. Scholar in Romance philology and linguistics, research experience in the fields of lexicology and lexicography, language contact, phonological/prosodic and grammatical typology of the Romance languages, historical linguistics; research, publications and teaching encompassing Italian, French and Spanish linguistics.
  • Linda Pillière is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Aix-Marseille University. Her main fields of research are in language diversity and change and especially intralingual translation, prescriptivism and stylistics. She is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Intralingual Translation (2023) and Standardising English: Norms and Margins in the History of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2018) has publised a single-authored monograph Intralingual Translation of British Novels: A Multimodal Stylistic Perspective (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). She has also contributed to various volumes such as Language in Place: Stylistic Perspectives on Landscape, Place and Environment (John Benjamins, 2021), Language Prescription: Values, Ideologies and Identity (Multilingual ,2020) and The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics (Bloomsbury Press, 2016).