The 4th Naxos Summer School on Language Variation and Change in Ancient and Medieval Europe (July 28 – August 3, 2019) will be organizing a workshop on “Language Change in Indo-European”, to be held on July 31, 2019.
Abstracts that approach change in Indo-European languages (from Proto-Indo-European to daughter languages, or in Indo-European branches) from any perspective are welcome, including: historical morpho-syntax, historical phonology, historical pragmatics, historical sociolinguistics.
The rich historical data of Indo-European languages offer a stable basis for the formation and validation of language change theories, and mainly for those analyzing the direction of change.
The idea of the workshop is to offer our summer schools participants as well as other scholars interested in a systematic study of change in Indo-European languages, the opportunity to present their ongoing research or the results of their studies on change and its directions in the Indo-European family. We encourage papers of both data- and theory-oriented approaches. Presentations will last 20 minutes, allowing 10 minutes for discussion.
The issues to be addressed in the workshop include the following topics:
(i) new perspectives on phonological or morpho-syntactic reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European;
(ii) new analyses of long-standing questions that concern, for instance, gender-animacy-number, diathesis-voice, cases and alignment, finiteness and non-finiteness, prepositions-postpositions-prefixes in Indo-European;
(iii) new approaches to the study of features (isoglosses) that are shared by more than one Indo-European branches;
(iv) new methods of analyzing the directions of (phonological/ morpho-syntactic/ lexical/ pragmatic) change in Indo-European;
(v) new trends in computational Indo-European linguistics (and computational cladistics).
Please email your 350-words (excluding references) abstract to Elly van Gelderen (ellyvangelderen@asu.edu), Alexander Bergs (abergs@uos.de), Nikolaos Lavidas (nlavidas@enl.uoa.gr), by April 15, 2019.