Research projects
Current Research Projects
- Principal Investigator: ‘Contact and change: The syntax of the Romeyka (Hellenic varieties) of Pontus.’ Collaborators: Prof. Peter Mackridge (University of Oxford), Dr Hakan Özkan (University of Münster), Mr Nikos Michailidis (Princeton University), Prof. Stavroula Tsiplakou (University of Cyprus), EdiSyn (University of Amsterdam), Dr Isabelle Buchstaller (University of Newcastle). Description: The aim of the project is to investigate the syntax and the microvariation of the Romeyka varieties of Pontus, which are spoken in North-East Turkey. Although the Pontic variety spoken in Greece is by far the best described Greek dialect (Drettas 1997), very little is known about the Romeyka varieties of Pontus (but cf. Mackridge 1987), and especially about its syntax. Investigating it now is crucial because: a) Romeyka shows signs of language death (Özkan 2006); b) Romeyka is becoming attrited through contact with Turkish and, to a lesser extent, with Standard Modern Greek.
- Co-investigator: ‘Modelling Change: The paths of French.’ Funding Body: Major Collaborative Research Initiative by the Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada. Principal investigator: Prof. France Martineau, University of Ottawa. Duration: 2005-2010. Description: This major research project focuses on the history of the French language, starting with the French spoken in Canada during the New France era and going back to its origins in the Middle Ages. Our study of French is essential to the construction of a renewed theoretical model of linguistic change. Until now, the history of French for the period we studied is built upon two main sources: language discourse (grammars, treaties on French, and other texts of an ideological nature) and literary texts (from the Chanson de Roland to Racine or Corneille). Without disregarding these corpora, we intend to address fundamental questions about change by building a corpus representative of a pluralistic society (info from the site).
- Collaborator: ‘Pragmatic resources in old Indo-European languages.’ Funding Body: Norwegian Research Council under their YFF programme. Principal investigator: Dr. Dag Trygve Truslew Haug, University of Oslo. Duration: 2008-2012. Description: This project will be a close linguistic study of the language in the Greek text of the New Testament as well as its translations into the old Indo-European languages Latin, Gothic, Armenian and Old Church Slavonic. The project aims at describing and accounting for the so-called pragmatic resources of these languages, i.e. the resources that the grammar makes available for structuring information in a text, and eventually to compare the different systems from a typological and a genetic perspective (info from the site).
- Collaborator ‘Information Structure and Word Order Change in Germanic and Romance Languages’ Funding Body: Norwegian Research Council. Principal investigator: Dr. Kristin Bech and Dr. Kristine Eide, University of Oslo. Duration: 2010-2014
Past Research Projects
- Principal Investigator: ‘Language contact in medieval Cyprus: The linguistic record.’ Funding Body: Small Research Grant by British Academy. Co-investigator: Dr Marina Terkourafi (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Full amount awarded: £7500. Duration: April 2007-October 2009. Description: The purpose of this project is to contribute to our knowledge of how languages change when they come into contact with each other, taking a particular variety –Cypriot Greek– and a particular phenomenon from that variety –the loss of the genitive plural from the morphological paradigm of masculine adjectives and nouns– as a case study. Noted since the earliest descriptions of Cypriot Greek, this phenomenon has been attributed to transfer during translation from French originals. Old French preserved a nominative/oblique distinction but not an accusative/genitive one and it is precisely this dual case system that Cypriot is being claimed to be mapped on. We test this hypothesis based on three texts spanning the period of most intense contact between the two varieties (13th to 15th c. CE).
- Early Career Fellow: ‘The syntax and the diachronic evolution of the earlier stages of the Romance languages.’ Funding Body: Early Career Fellowship by CRASSH, University of Cambridge. Full amount awarded: £5000. Duration: Michaelmas 2008. Description: The project aims to investigate issues concerning the syntax and diachronic evolution of Old Romance languages. The topics under investigation pertain to: (i) comparative word order in Old Romance; (ii) the licensing of null subjects in Old French; (iii) the loss of null subjects in the history of French and, in particular, the language contact hypothesis. The project makes a coherent intellectual whole because: (a) the phenomena of (null) subjects and word order interact a great deal, the one constituting a sine qua non for the study of the other. It follows that unless the synchronic analysis is settled no diachronic account can be developed to account for either the word order changes in Modern Romance or the loss of null subjects in the history of French; (b) the same methodology is uniformly applied to all data hence boosting data comparability and enabling us for the first time to compare diverse Old Romance data quantitatively; (c) an analysis taking advantage of the findings/tools from acquisition, socio-linguistics, history, statistics, etc. is employed in order to explain the data in question.