Call for Papers - Corpus Approach to Ancient Greek, Riga 2018
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FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS: A corpus and usage-based approach to Ancient
Greek: from the Archaic period until the Koiné
Riga, University of Latvia, April 12-14, 2018
It has been a long standing tradition in linguistics since de Saussure
to distinguish between langue and parole. The former was considered to
represent a self-sufficient system consisting of well-defined and
distinct categories and sharp constraints that interact at different
levels of language such as morphology, syntax or lexicon to produce
grammatical utterances. For example, mainstream generative approach
inherited this spirit of thinking from the earlier structuralists. This
understanding of language consequently shapes the way the argumentation
and analysis is carried out. The evidence must either corroborate the
analysis or be assigned a different category. Fuzzy boundaries – a
phenomenon widely discussed in the literature (inter alia, Ungerer &
Schmid 1999: 23) – are not easily dealt with here, exactly as ongoing
change (cf. Hopper (1987)’s “Emergent Grammar”) as well as aspects of
actual usage.
This approach has been challenged by the usage-based approach to
linguistics (Bybee 2010) in which parole becomes the subject of
investigation as it is precisely the usage that shapes the linguistic
structure. The latter is, in turn, considered to be constrained by
general cognitive processes such as automatization, analogy or
categorization as well as sociolinguistic factors. Language dynamics as
observed from synchronic and/or diachronic corpus data provides here an
important piece of evidence, since language development must be
crucially shaped by language usage.
Since linguistic experiments or grammaticality judgments are not
available to linguists working on Ancient Greek the research on it has
been inevitably corpus-driven and crucially based on language use (and,
e.g., not on constructed examples). Moreover, it is well-known in
Classical Philology that different authors represent sometimes not only
different dialects (as, for example, Herodotus with his Ionic based
variety) but also different styles which orient themselves onto
different stages of language development. The strong urge towards
imitation of the previous literary tradition which was perceived as a
model is a serious confounding factor for the linguistic research. For
example, Plutarch – even though in principle belonging to the Roman
period – imitates a number of features from previous periods.
Furthermore, other factors may also obscure the study as, for example,
the phenomenon of text reuse in the historiographical tradition where
texts of earlier authors were repeatedly reused as sources and passages
from them – sometimes with, sometimes without changes – were integrated
into later works. This dialectally and socially based variation creates
a serious confusion when analysing Ancient Greek from a grammarian’s
perspective.
It seems, however, possible to overcome the potential inconsistency of
the data with which we are confronted by exploiting tools and methods
from usage-based approaches such as measuring statistically significant
effects of a particular pattern for a particular period as opposed to
other patterns and periods. This can allow us to gloss over the
particular characteristics of the writings of individual authors, while
still being able to establish trends that are typical for a particular
period of Ancient Greek. This kind of approach has been successfully
adopted in, for example, Bentein (2016) and Crellin (2012) in relation
to diachronic trends in the Greek verb.
While unfortunately there is no linguistically oriented corpus of
Ancient Greek for all its periods there are a number of linguistic small
corpora focusing on particular authors or periods available that may
successfully be used by linguists such as the collection of
(automatically) annotated Ancient Greek corpora at INESS / “Ancient
Greek” prepared by different projects/scholars such as the PROIEL
project at U Oslo or Perseus Project at U Buffalo and U Leipzig. Of
course, there is the largest and almost exhaustive corpus of Ancient
Greek Thesaurus Linguae Graecae but, unfortunately, it is not
open-access and it is not tagged for linguistic purposes.
The aim of this conference is to gather researchers that exploit
statistical and corpus obtained data for their analyses and claims.
Importantly, we do not conceive of corpus data as data that are obtained
by some technical, “automated” tool, we are equally interested in the
research based on manually collected samples or databases that may be
used to identify specific trends which in turn are integrated into the
analysis. This is all the more important since it is currently not
always an easy task for a linguist or philologist to obtain corpus data.
Moreover, in this workshop, we would like to focus on usage-based
research into Ancient Greek while methodological and technical aspects
are subordinate at this conference.
We call for submissions on any aspect of Ancient Greek (from the Homeric
period until the Koiné) – including not only grammarians’ but also
sociolinguistic and variational studies – that are based on corpus or
statistical data.
REFERENCES
Bentein, Klaas. 2016. Verbal Periphrasis in Ancient Greek: Have- and Be-
Constructions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bybee, Joan L. 2010: Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Crellin, Robert. 2012. The Greek Perfect Active System: 200 BC - AD 150.
University of Cambridge Ph.D. Thesis.
Hopper, Paul 1987: Emergent Grammar, Proceedings of the Thirteenth
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 13, 139-157.
Ungerer, Friedrich & Hans-Jörg Schmid 1999: An Introduction to Cognitive
Linguistics. London: Longman.
INVITED SPEAKERS (alphabetically):
Klaas Bentein (Ghent University)
Guiseppe Celano (Leipzig University)
James Clackson (University of Cambridge)
José Luis García Ramón (Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, Harvard
University)
Chiara Gianollo (University of Bologna)
Dag Haug (University of Oslo)
Geoffrey Horrocks (University of Cambrigde)
Daniel Kölligan (University of Cologne)
Martti Leiwo, Sonja Dahlgren & Marja Vierros (University of Helsinki)
Amalia Moser (University of Athens)
Paul Widmer & Florian Sommer (University of Zürich)
IMPORTANT DATES:
- Deadline for abstract submission: October 1, 2017
- Applicants notified of abstract acceptance: December 1, 2017
- Registration: From January 15, 2018
- Conference session: April 12-14, 2018
FURTHER INFORMATION: http://rafiyenko.info/riga2018/
