Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Corpus linguistics in the Greek papyri: developing a corpus to study variation and change in the post-classical Greek complementation system" "Dirk Speelman" "Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (QLVL), Leuven, Ancient History, Leuven, Comparative, Historical and Applied Linguistics, Leuven" "The aim of this PhD project is to advance the corpus-linguistic study of the Greek papyri, a large diachronic corpus (3rd century BC – 8th century AD) of non-literary Greek. It consists of two central parts. The first part is focused on corpus design: starting from the transcribed (XML) version of these texts, it describes a pipeline model to supply the papyri step for step with linguistic information, using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. The different components are described in the individual chapters. First, the texts are tokenized (divided into individual words). Next, their part-of-speech, morphology and lemma is automatically determined. The next step is syntactic parsing: the individual sentences are transformed into syntactic dependency trees. Finally, a number of techniques for automatic semantic analysis are investigated, including the creation of so-called distributional vector models for the individual lemmas, which describe their lexical meaning, and the labeling of the semantic relations in the sentence (“semantic role labeling”).The next part describes how these automatically analyzed texts can be used for corpus research. The central linguistic topic is variation and change in the verbal complementation system of Greek, studied from an usage-based framework. In a first introductory chapter, I analyze how such verbal complementation constructions should be defined, and how these constructions can be retrieved from the corpus data. Special attention also goes to the question how constructions that are vague between complements and adverbials fit in this analysis. The next two chapters are focused on two important loci of variation in the Greek complementation system. The first of them analyzes complementizer choice: in this chapter, I describe how a number of exploratory quantitative techniques can be used to gain an overview of the main extra- and intra-linguistic factors determining the choice between a large number of possible complementizers. This chapter also examines the question how systematic the Greek complementation ‘system’ truly is. The second of these chapters is focused on verbal stem choice: on the hand of a specific case study (speech verb constructions), I investigate which temporal, aspectual and modal constraints describe the choice between the four verbal stems (present, aorist, perfect and future).In a final, concluding chapter, I analyze the main findings of the corpus-linguistic approach I developed, describing its strengths and shortcomings, and how these shortcomings can be overcome in the future." "The Aeolodoric Theory: a paradigm for Ancient Greek linguistic approaches" "Klaas Bentein" "Department of Linguistics" "My research examines linguistic awareness in the Greek world by focusing on ancient linguistic approaches which still inform the Modern Greek debate on the definition of a national language. The way that people represent language and communication processes is important to understand how social groups value and orient to language. While attention has already been given to the relationship between language and identity in the Ancient and Modern Greek worlds, little work has been done on these metalinguistic perspectives and little attention has been paid to the convergence between these perspectives in ancient and modern times. My research will fill this gap by proposing a comparative study between ancient linguistic sources and a modern theory called Aeolodoric theory, with the aim of better understanding ancient linguistic conceptions from a diachronic perspective, of providing a historical contextualisation of modern tendencies, and of evaluating the impact that linguistic conceptions have on the transmission of the Greek language. This research also engages with broad sociolinguistic issues, such as the role of artificial languages, their use to define collective identities, and the way in which linguistic varieties are related to each other in diglossic communities." """Language"" and/vs. ""dialect"" in Early Modern linguistic thought: concept formation and empirical underpinnings, with special reference to the ancient Greek background" "Toon Van Hal" "Comparative, Historical and Applied Linguistics, Leuven" "Although the roots of the twin concepts ""language"" and ""dialect"" hark back to Greek antiquity, there is no general agreement about their definitions in present-day scholarship, to the point that a number of scholars refrain from using the term ""dialect"" as distinct from ""language."" In order to arrive at a better understanding of this pair and its modern conceptualization, a systematic historiographical study of its origin and development is required. For the history of the concepts ""dialect"" and ""language"" in particular, the early modern period is a crucial stage. During this period, scholars theorized on these concepts, and applied their insights to the study of the Ancient Greek dialects, traditionally divided into Attic, Ionic, Aeolic, Doric, and koine (‘common dialect/language’). The close and complex interplay between these two aspects of early modern language study has, however, not yet been investigated systematically, a research lacuna which the present project aims to fill." "Verbal periphrases in Greek: a typological and diachronic research from cognitive- linguistic perspective." "Mark Janse" "Department of Linguistics, Department of Latin and Greek" "This project researches the use of verbal periphrases in postclassical Greek, based on a corpus of early Christian biographical (narrative) texts. The project is embedded in the theory know under the umbrella term ""cognitive Linguistics"". The main objectives are: (1) definition and typology (2) description of the position of the verbal system (3) description of the use in context (pragmatics)." "Sociolinguistic variation in Ancient Greek dialects: mapping the contact between Doric and Koine Greek" "Klaas Bentein" "Department of Linguistics" "Ancient Greek dialects exhibit a great deal of geographic, diachronic, and sociolinguistic variation in their usage, both as spoken and as literary varieties. The Hellenistic age (4th – 1st cc. BC) was a crucial period for language contact and the rise of linguistic awareness, on account of the spread of a new variety used as lingua franca, the Koine. Previous studies have focussed on the diachronic spread of Koine and the gradual disappearance of the other Greek dialects, but still little is known on the linguistic and social factors of dialectal contact between them, and on the processes that led to the disappearance of dialects. My research will fill this gap by investigating dialectal mixture in inscriptions and the communicative situations involved. I will study Doric dialects—the variety most resilient to Koine— through a comparative analysis of different regions, to pinpoint the linguistic and sociolinguistic variables that led to language change, both locally and cross-dialectally. My methodology will consist of the examination of ancient sources through the lens of variationist sociolinguistics and in the application of theories of language contact and sociolinguistic variation to a corpus language such as Ancient Greek. The results will offer new insights into the history of the Greek language, the status of its varieties and the speakers’ perceptions of the language." "Greek Spaces in Roman Times: The Construction of Greek Geography in Pliny’s Naturalis Historia." "Margherita Fantoli" "Cultural Studies Research Group" "The influence of Greek culture on Pliny’s the Elder Naturalis Historia has been largely recognized over the last few years. However, an overall analysis of Pliny’s geographical discourse on Greece is still lacking. The aim of this project is to provide a comprehensive insight into Pliny’s description of Greece and to understand how Pliny’s perspective influenced the overall image of it. Combining the criteria of the history of knowledge inspired by Östling et al. (2018) with the Digital Classical Geography of Palladino (2021), I will detect and reconstruct the spatial model of Greece. The investigative strategy will be based on an innovative twofold methodology. First, I will employ sentiment analysis and discourse analysis to investigate the linguistic and narrative devices Pliny uses to characterize Greece. Second, I will examine the spatial connectivity between Greek spaces and the relational structure according to which Pliny disseminates knowledge about them throughout NH. This will result in a database of Greek geographical entities which will be encoded in a multi- layered digital map of the Greek spatial model in the NH–a tool that will support the visualization and investigation of connections running across Greek spaces. Finally, the analysis of the position of Greece in Pliny’s geographical and political discourse will contribute to shed new light on the Roman perspective on Greece during the Early Imperial history and during the Flavian age more specifically." "Latin to Greek. The Latinity of the Ancient Greek Love Novel" "Koen De Temmerman" "Department of Literary Studies" "This project aims at a systematic analysis of the presences (in different forms) of anumber of Latin literary genres in the ancient Greek novel. The driving research hypothesis is that Greek novels to varying degrees and in different ways address, respond to and make creative use of Latin narrative traditions, in order to (a) conceptualize the intertwined notions of love and heroism, and (b) develop metaliterary thoughts about the generic encoding underlying these notions." "Leibniz and his circle: 'precomparative' linguistics in Germany (1670-1750)." "Lambert Isebaert" "Greek Studies, Leuven, Comparative, Historical and Applied Linguistics, Leuven" "Language comparison and emancipation: The pivotal role of Ancient Greek in Renaissance language studies (ca. 1390– 1600)" "Toon Van Hal" "Latin Literature, Leuven, Comparative, Historical and Applied Linguistics, Leuven" "When did the comparative turn occur in language studies? Even though linguistic comparison has earlier precursors, it became common only in the early modern era. The period after 1600, in particular, has been regarded as a crucial turning point. This project will investigate the hypothesis that the roots of the comparative approach should be dated earlier, in the Renaissance (ca. 1390– 1600). The rediscovery of Greek grammar played a pivotal role in this development, as many humanists tied their native vernaculars to the Greek tongue when composing grammars of both Greek and the vernaculars. This endeavor led them to compare these languages to various degrees of intensity, in various ways, and with regard to various features. This project will investigate whether and, if so, how this comparative reflex was related to the standardization of the vernaculars. More specifically, the project will systematically test for the first time the idea that the Greek language stimulated the emancipation of the vernaculars. Testing this second hypothesis is crucial, because it is often upheld in modern scholarship but barely supported with concrete evidence. The project will also explore the possibility of integrating the “comparative turn hypothesis” and the “emancipation hypothesis” into one overarching hypothesis. It will result in five scholarly articles and a database of Renaissance grammars of Greek (inspiration), provisionally entitled Anagennèsis" "Language and Ideas: Towards a New Computational and Corpus-Based Approach to Ancient Greek Semantics and the History of Ideas" "Toon Van Hal" "Comparative, Historical and Applied Linguistics, Leuven" "Although corpus-based methods are becoming increasingly more common in humanities research, the possibilities for the ancient Greek corpus are still underexplored and hence restricted.This research project aims at(1) making decisive progress in the automated semantic annotation of Ancient Greek, by making use of a morphologically and syntactically annotated text corpus consisting of almost 40 million tokens and by applying distributional approaches to Greek diachronic semantics.(2) exploring its ensuing corpus-based possibilities for researchers comprising not only linguists and classicists, but also historians and philosophers. More specifically, it will focus on corpus-based solutions for ongoing problems in the study of language-related ideas expressed in Ancient Greek.It is the project’s aim to make the ancient Greek text corpus ‘semantically’ readable, both for humans and for computers."