Syntactic change in Greek through an acquisition perspective

Convenors: Ioanna Sitaridou and Ianthi Tsimpli

The theme of the seminar will be language change and language acquisition in the history of Greek. We will look at some important syntactic changes in Greek —in different diatopic and diachronic varieties— from the perspective of language acquisition. In doing so, we shall be sketching a new explanatory paradigm whereby theoretical machinery is kept to a minimum (e.g., no special contact mechanisms) thanks to a very careful examination of socio-linguistics and available empirical data thus achieving a better understanding of the richness of the input which is key to understanding both variation and change.

Participants will be expected to give critical presentations on the research article(s) under discussion, but also more broadly.

Module requirements: For Linguistics MPhil students, knowledge of Greek is desirable but not essential. For ELAC students some knowledge of linguistics (for instance, at least a couple of undergraduate linguistics papers.) and good knowledge of Greek are essential.