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Project

The cross-linguistic application of grammatical categories: The early modern genesis of a contemporary problem, with specific reference to the relevance of ‘typically Ancient Greek’ categories (ca. 1470–1800)

Is it justified to describe different languages by means of the same grammatical categories? The cross-linguistic application of categories is still a thorny issue in current linguistics, the roots of which lie in the early modern period, when West-European scholars started to produce on a large scale grammars of languages other than Latin. Although the Latin tradition remained the main descriptive framework, the Renaissance rediscovery of Ancient Greek familiarized scholars with a number of categories difficult to apply to Latin: e.g., ‘aorist’, ‘article’, and ‘optative’. They resorted to such categories when they sensed that traditional Latin categories were not adequate, a thought process important to current linguistics for two main reasons. On the one hand, the ways in which these ‘typically Greek’ categories were transposed to other languages betray ideas and assumptions about the cross-linguistic application of categories, since it was not as straightforward to resort to these categories as it was to adopt the categories of the familiar Latin model (itself an ancient narrowing of the Greek model). On the other hand, the transposition process resulted in the integration of new categories into the (early) modern general descriptive apparatus. No systematic investigation into the historical genesis of the problem of the cross-linguistic use of categories or the history of these ‘typically Greek’ categories has been pursued, a lacuna the present project attempts to fill.

Date:1 Oct 2017 →  30 Sep 2020
Keywords:Cross-linguistic grammatical categories
Disciplines:Linguistics, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Other languages and literary studies