Especial para filólogos: The Postclassical Greek: the Intersections of Philology and Linguistics, 15-16-17/02/2016, Mainz (Germany)

Información en Fasti Congressuum

Información en el blog de la Oxford University Byzantine Society

Deadline for the submission of the abstracts: October 1, 2015.

Description

Greek is one of the few languages in the world with an uninterrupted literary tradition. Nearly all the periods of Greek are well-documented by large amounts of texts. While the pre-classical and classical periods have been receiving much scholarly attention for centuries (for a synoptic overview see Giannakis, ed. and 2014; Bakker, ed., 2010), the study of post-classical Greek, from New Testament Greek until the Byzantine period, is a much recent phenomenon, albeit with a large body of research (cf., inter alia, Browning 1983; Horrocks 2010; Bentein 2014; Gianollo 2010; and Janse 1993).

This interdisciplinary workshop aims at bringing together scholars working on different aspects of post-classical Greek up to the Byzantine period. We strongly believe that only integration of the linguistic and philological knowledge can create a coherent model of the processes that underlay the language change of that period and provide answers as to why Greek of the Byzantine period is the way it is.

We aim at highlighting language changes /sensu latissimo/ of that period from different perspectives. The topics we would like to address are among the following (but are not restricted to them):

- Language standardization phenomena, penetration of the colloquial elements of the period into written texts; the effects of the tradition, as, for example, scribes’ mistakes; what can be gained or lost from studying the manuscripts directly?

- Parameters and metrics for distinguishing between normalized texts and texts with a stronger penetration of colloquial elements of contemporary Greek; influence of Classical and Biblical Greek;

- Principles that underlie the written tradition; text copying (such as, e.g., amendments/corrections by copyists);

- The role of Byzantium in the preservation of Classical texts: How much intervention on the part of the Byzantine scribes/excerptors/compilers is there to expect? How do the changes to the Classical texts made in the Byzantine period can be traced and how do they influence our understanding of the Classical period? (cf. Kaldellis 2012)

- The social, historical and cultural environment that potentially may have constrained the language of that period; influence of other languages and the way the interaction with other languages was organized;

- The sociolinguistic situation: different registers/lects, diatopic and diastratic variation; multilingualism;

- Effects of the historical-critical editing (as, for example, normalization or emendations): To what extent do they mirror the linguistic “reality”? Are these effects rather insignificant or do they have a potential to influence our understanding of the language?

- Is the chronological division of the language tradition into Classical, Byzantine and Modern, which influenced the study of Greek since the Renaissance times, justified?

- Methods and metrics for dating texts on the basis of linguistic phenomena;

- Purely linguistic approaches to language change such as grammaticalization, language contact, structural and functional explanations, etc.; emergence of new grammatical categories; disappearance of grammatical categories;

- How Digital Humanities may contribute to the questions addressed in the workshop? Which corpora do we have? What kind of data, tools and methods are available?

- Corpus-based approaches to the study of Greek.

Invited speakers (titles are preliminary)

Marina Benedetti (University of Siena), "The middle and perfect in the Greek grammatical tradition, from Apollonius Dyscolus to Byzantine scholars"

Klaas Bentein (University of Ghent), "Finite versus non-finite complementation in documentary papyri from the Roman and Byzantine period (I - VIII AD)"

Robert Crellin (University of Cambridge), "The socio-linguistic status of Biblical Greek: comparing the language of the Septuagint and Josephus"

Chiara Gianollo (University of Cologne), "Syntactic factors of the Greek genitive-dative syncretism"

Brian Joseph (Ohio University), "Grammaticalization of the periphrastic future"

Daniel Kölligan (University of Cologne), "Anmerkungen zur Syntax des Johannes Malalas"

Nikolaos Lavidas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) & Dag Trygve Truslew Haug (University of Oslo), "Participles in time: change from above in biblical Greek"

Jose Luis García Ramón (University of Cologne), "Grammatical und lexical structures on change in Post-Classical Greek: local dialects and supradialectal tendencies"

Charlotte Schubert (University of Leipzig), title to be announced

Staffan Wahlgren (University of Trondheim), title to be announced

Abstract Submission

Abstracts are invited for the workshop session. Each presentation has 20 minutes followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Only one paper per participant is admitted.

Abstracts should be anonymous, maximally of one page in length, excluding references and examples (in .doc, .pdf or .docx).

Abstracts should be submitted to both organizers via e-mail: dariya.rafiyenko@uni-leipzig.de, ilja.serzants@uni-mainz.de

The deadline for the submission of the abstract is: October 1, 2015.

Applicants will be notified of abstract acceptance by: October 15, 2015.

All contributors will be invited to submit a version of their paper to the conference follow-up volume to be published with DeGruyter. Further details will be made available in due time.