I am Assistant Professor in Historical Linguistics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.
My central research interests focus on language change and typology, with semantics being the main connecting thread.
I hold a PhD in Linguistics from the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. My doctoral dissertation was a diachronic study of the semantics of ancient Greek prepositions (mainly of the allative eis), in which I relied on the analytical tools of cognitive linguistics and adopted a typological perspective.
In the years after my Ph.D., I was involved in several funded research projects, which can be thematically divided into two main axes. The first axis pertains to the examination of the cross-linguistic differences in the linguistic construal of motion. The second axis refers to the detection of cross-linguistic commonalities in the polysemy patterns manifested by semantically comparable linguistic expressions.
I held various academic positions at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), at the Free University of Berlin (Excellence Cluster 264 Topoi), the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Münster, the University of Kassel (Germany), the National Research University, Higher School of Economics in Moscow (Russia). In 2016, I was awarded a Marie Curie BeIPD Cofund Postdoctoral Fellowship (Grant number: 600405) for my project “Lexical Diachronic Semantic Maps: representing and explaining meaning extension” (abbr. "Le Diasema") at the University of Liège (ULg). More detailed information on “Le Diasema” you may find in the project’s website: http://web.philo.ulg.ac.be/lediasema/
As of 2012, I have taught various courses on historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, lexical semantics, pragmatics, empirical methods in linguistics, and the trilingual text of the Rosetta Stone.
For more information on my academic experience, visit the ‘CV’ section on the top of this page.
My central research interests focus on language change and typology, with semantics being the main connecting thread.
I hold a PhD in Linguistics from the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. My doctoral dissertation was a diachronic study of the semantics of ancient Greek prepositions (mainly of the allative eis), in which I relied on the analytical tools of cognitive linguistics and adopted a typological perspective.
In the years after my Ph.D., I was involved in several funded research projects, which can be thematically divided into two main axes. The first axis pertains to the examination of the cross-linguistic differences in the linguistic construal of motion. The second axis refers to the detection of cross-linguistic commonalities in the polysemy patterns manifested by semantically comparable linguistic expressions.
I held various academic positions at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), at the Free University of Berlin (Excellence Cluster 264 Topoi), the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Münster, the University of Kassel (Germany), the National Research University, Higher School of Economics in Moscow (Russia). In 2016, I was awarded a Marie Curie BeIPD Cofund Postdoctoral Fellowship (Grant number: 600405) for my project “Lexical Diachronic Semantic Maps: representing and explaining meaning extension” (abbr. "Le Diasema") at the University of Liège (ULg). More detailed information on “Le Diasema” you may find in the project’s website: http://web.philo.ulg.ac.be/lediasema/
As of 2012, I have taught various courses on historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, lexical semantics, pragmatics, empirical methods in linguistics, and the trilingual text of the Rosetta Stone.
For more information on my academic experience, visit the ‘CV’ section on the top of this page.
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In the present work, we provide further evidence for enriched lexical constructions and their indispensability in describing the polysemy of one of the basic motion verbs in Ancient Greek, the verb baínō, whose most general gloss is ‘go’, characterized as denoting self-propelled, goal-directed movement (Napoli 2006; Nikitina 2013). Drawing on the behavioral profile approach adopted in several of the works above, we retrieved all instances of the verb (total of 579 tokens) in three authors (Homer, Euripides, Plato), each representing a different genre and era (8th c. BCE–4th c. BCE). The data were extracted from the Perseus digital library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/; last access April 2017) and each occurrence was annotated manually for features like sentence type, subject animacy, syntactic (e.g., prepositional phrase, infinitive, participle, zero) and semantic (e.g., source, goal, path) type of complement, lexical fillers of the complement slot, transitivity (since baínō also has transitive uses), verb inflection (showing tense-aspect and person-number), word order (of verb and complement) and discourse type (e.g., narrative, direct speech, chorus – a parameter that does not feature in earlier works). We then created separate pivot tables that allow us to automatically sort and display the data in a multidimensional chart, and most importantly to extract significant patterns.
Results clearly show that particular senses of baínō are attracted to particular morpho-syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic features. We suggest that such constellations should be analyzed as distinct lexical constructions, since the idiosyncratic features do not follow from more abstract grammatical constructions or from verbal semantics. We find, for instance, that particular senses may correlate exclusively with perfective aspect (e.g., the inchoative construction), or with a specific person-number inflection, or with a particular type of complement, or with very specific lexical fillers (as in the sense ‘mount’, which mainly co-occurs with the nouns naûs ‘ship’ and díphros ‘stool’), or with particular discourse contexts (in fact, some of these lexico-grammatical combinations seem to function as formulaic markers correlating with particular text-types and contexts). Importantly, more than one of these constraints (conventionalizations) may co-exist in the same sense, strongly arguing for enriched gestalts of morpho-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic features that are necessary for an adequate account of the verb’s polysemy and distribution.
References
Atkins, B. S. (1987). Semantic ID tags: Corpus evidence for dictionary senses. Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference of the UW Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary, 17–36.
Boas, H. C. (2005). Determining the productivity of resultative constructions: A reply to Goldberg and Jackendoff. Language, 81(2): 448–64.
Boas, H. C. (2008). Determining the structure of lexical entries and grammatical constructions inConstruction Grammar. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 6: 113–44.
Boas, H. C. (2013). Cognitive Construction Grammar. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. OUP. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396683.013.0013
Berez, A. L., & Gries, S. Th. (2008). In defense of corpus-based methods: A behavioral profile analysis of polysemous get in English. Proceedings of the 24th NWLC, 3-4 May 2008, Seattle, WA.
Croft, W. (2003). Lexical rules vs. constructions: A false dichotomy. In H. Cuyckens, T. Berg, R. Dirven, & K.-U. Panther (eds.), Motivation in language: Studies in honour of Günter Radden, 49-68. John Benjamins.
Fillmore, C., & Atkins, B. S. (1992). Towards a frame-based lexicon: The semantics of RISK and its neighbors. In A. Lehrer & E. Kittay (eds.), Frames, fields and contrasts: New essays in semantics and lexical organization, 75-102. Laurens Erlbaum.
Goldberg, A., & Jackendoff, R. (2005). The end result(ative). Language, 81(2): 474-77.
Gries, S. Th. (2006). Corpus-based methods and cognitive semantics: The many senses of to run. In S. Gries & A. Stefanowitsch (eds.), Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics, 57-99. Mouton de Gruyter.
Hanks, P. (1996). Contextual dependency and lexical sets. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 1(1): 75–98.
Hilpert, M. (2008). Germanic future constructions. A usage-based approach to language change. John Benjamins.
Hilpert, M. (2016). Change in modal meanings. Another look at the shifting collocates of may. Constructions and Frames, 8(1): 66-85.
Jansegers, M, & Gries, S. Th. (2017). Towards a dynamic behavioral profile: A diachronic study of polysemous sentir in Spanish. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic theory. DOI 10.1515/cllt-2016-0080.
Napoli, M. (2006). Aspect and actionality in Homeric Greek: A contrastive analysis. Milano: FrancoAngeli.
Nemoto, N. (2005). Verbal polysemy and frame semantics in Construction Grammar. In M. Fried & H. C. Boas (eds.), Grammatical constructions: Back to the roots, 118-36. John Benjamins.
Nikitina, T. (2013). Lexical splits in the encoding of motion events from Archaic to Classical Greek. In J. Goschler & A. Stefanowitsch (eds.), Variation and change in the encoding of motion events, 185-202. John Benjamins.
In the present work, we provide further evidence for enriched lexical constructions and their indispensability in describing the polysemy of one of the basic motion verbs in Ancient Greek, the verb baínō, whose most general gloss is ‘go’, characterized as denoting self-propelled, goal-directed movement (Napoli 2006; Nikitina 2013). Drawing on the behavioral profile approach adopted in several of the works above, we retrieved all instances of the verb (total of 579 tokens) in three authors (Homer, Euripides, Plato), each representing a different genre and era (8th c. BCE–4th c. BCE). The data were extracted from the Perseus digital library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/; last access April 2017) and each occurrence was annotated manually for features like sentence type, subject animacy, syntactic (e.g., prepositional phrase, infinitive, participle, zero) and semantic (e.g., source, goal, path) type of complement, lexical fillers of the complement slot, transitivity (since baínō also has transitive uses), verb inflection (showing tense-aspect and person-number), word order (of verb and complement) and discourse type (e.g., narrative, direct speech, chorus – a parameter that does not feature in earlier works). We then created separate pivot tables that allow us to automatically sort and display the data in a multidimensional chart, and most importantly to extract significant patterns.
Results clearly show that particular senses of baínō are attracted to particular morpho-syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic features. We suggest that such constellations should be analyzed as distinct lexical constructions, since the idiosyncratic features do not follow from more abstract grammatical constructions or from verbal semantics. We find, for instance, that particular senses may correlate exclusively with perfective aspect (e.g., the inchoative construction), or with a specific person-number inflection, or with a particular type of complement, or with very specific lexical fillers (as in the sense ‘mount’, which mainly co-occurs with the nouns naûs ‘ship’ and díphros ‘stool’), or with particular discourse contexts (in fact, some of these lexico-grammatical combinations seem to function as formulaic markers correlating with particular text-types and contexts). Importantly, more than one of these constraints (conventionalizations) may co-exist in the same sense, strongly arguing for enriched gestalts of morpho-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic features that are necessary for an adequate account of the verb’s polysemy and distribution.
References
Atkins, B. S. (1987). Semantic ID tags: Corpus evidence for dictionary senses. Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference of the UW Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary, 17–36.
Boas, H. C. (2005). Determining the productivity of resultative constructions: A reply to Goldberg and Jackendoff. Language, 81(2): 448–64.
Boas, H. C. (2008). Determining the structure of lexical entries and grammatical constructions inConstruction Grammar. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 6: 113–44.
Boas, H. C. (2013). Cognitive Construction Grammar. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. OUP. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396683.013.0013
Berez, A. L., & Gries, S. Th. (2008). In defense of corpus-based methods: A behavioral profile analysis of polysemous get in English. Proceedings of the 24th NWLC, 3-4 May 2008, Seattle, WA.
Croft, W. (2003). Lexical rules vs. constructions: A false dichotomy. In H. Cuyckens, T. Berg, R. Dirven, & K.-U. Panther (eds.), Motivation in language: Studies in honour of Günter Radden, 49-68. John Benjamins.
Fillmore, C., & Atkins, B. S. (1992). Towards a frame-based lexicon: The semantics of RISK and its neighbors. In A. Lehrer & E. Kittay (eds.), Frames, fields and contrasts: New essays in semantics and lexical organization, 75-102. Laurens Erlbaum.
Goldberg, A., & Jackendoff, R. (2005). The end result(ative). Language, 81(2): 474-77.
Gries, S. Th. (2006). Corpus-based methods and cognitive semantics: The many senses of to run. In S. Gries & A. Stefanowitsch (eds.), Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics, 57-99. Mouton de Gruyter.
Hanks, P. (1996). Contextual dependency and lexical sets. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 1(1): 75–98.
Hilpert, M. (2008). Germanic future constructions. A usage-based approach to language change. John Benjamins.
Hilpert, M. (2016). Change in modal meanings. Another look at the shifting collocates of may. Constructions and Frames, 8(1): 66-85.
Jansegers, M, & Gries, S. Th. (2017). Towards a dynamic behavioral profile: A diachronic study of polysemous sentir in Spanish. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic theory. DOI 10.1515/cllt-2016-0080.
Napoli, M. (2006). Aspect and actionality in Homeric Greek: A contrastive analysis. Milano: FrancoAngeli.
Nemoto, N. (2005). Verbal polysemy and frame semantics in Construction Grammar. In M. Fried & H. C. Boas (eds.), Grammatical constructions: Back to the roots, 118-36. John Benjamins.
Nikitina, T. (2013). Lexical splits in the encoding of motion events from Archaic to Classical Greek. In J. Goschler & A. Stefanowitsch (eds.), Variation and change in the encoding of motion events, 185-202. John Benjamins.
In order to test the hypothesis that there is a preferential treatment of Goal elements as compared to Source elements, three different analyses were conducted: the first two deal with motion events (categories: Manner and Path verbs) and the last one with non-motion events which can be seen as parallel to motion event constructions (category: Change of Possession verbs; cf. Lakusta & Landau 2005). We not only analyze each language separately, but we also perform a comparison between the two languages. For example, we seek to find whether the typological difference between German (a satellite-framed language) and Greek (a verb-framed language) has an effect on the representation of Path elements (cf. Slobin 1996).
The Greek data come from the Corpus of Greek Texts (CST; http://sek.edu.gr/; see Goutsos 2010 for a detailed description). The size of the Greek corpus used in this study is ~14,500,000 words. The German data were extracted from the COSMAS II corpus compiled by IDS Mannheim (http://www.ids-mannheim.de/cosmas2/; see Kupietz et al. 2010). For the present purposes, a corpus of written German was chosen (Hamburger Morgenpost, diverse Schriftsteller, spektrumdirekt, ~21 million words). In order to avoid bias introduced by text-type-specific usage preferences, we have selected to draw data from three main sources in both languages, viz. newspapers, literature and academic texts. The data used in the analysis consist of a total of 400 randomly extracted tokens, i.e. 200 extractions for each language (for each verb). The observations were coded for (a) the Path element that is expressed (by means of a Prepositional Phrase [PP]); (b) the presence/ absence of a PP.
The corpus investigation in both languages has confirmed our hypothesis that all four event categories behave asymmetrically as for the Source-Goal distribution and that the Goal prevails over the Source. However, the analysis revealed not only similarities, but also differences between the two languages. As a matter of fact, in Change of Possession events the Goal bias was stronger for the German as compared to the Greek verbs.
In the light of the results reported in this article, an account for the Source-Goal asymmetry will be proposed, and the implications of the similarities and differences between German and Greek will be discussed.
for a workshop in the framework of the Marie Curie BeIPD Cofund postdoctoral project “Le Diasema: Lexical Diachronic Semantic Maps: Representing and explaining meaning extension”.
- Deadline for abstract submission: February 15, 2018
- Applicants notified of abstract acceptance: February 25th, 2018
- Type of presentation: Please note that only poster presentations will be accepted
- Organizers: Georgakopoulos, Thanasis (University of Liège); Polis, Stéphane (University of Liège/ F.R.S.-FNRS)
- URL: http://web.philo.ulg.ac.be/lediasema/workshop/
- Venue: Liège, Belgium, University of Liège, 27th-28th of June 2018
- Host Institute: The Department of Classical and Oriental Studies of the University of Liège (in collaboration with the research center in linguistics)
- No registration fee is required
Potential participants are requested to send an abstract (of up to 300 words, exclusive of references) by February 15, to the following address: [email protected] (Thanasis Georgakopoulos)
Invited speakers (alphabetically):
William Croft (University of New Mexico)
Alexandre François (Lacito – CNRS)
Volker Gast (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)
Eitan Grossman (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm (Stockholm University)
Johann Mattis List (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena)
Silvia Luraghi (University of Pavia)
Andrej Malchukov (Johannes Gutenberg-University)
Tatiana Nikitina (Inalco – UMR 8135 CNRS)
Loic-Michel Perrin (Inalco – CNRS)
Ekaterina Rakhilina & Daria Ryzhova (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow)
Martine Vanhove (Inalco – UMR 8135 CNRS)
Anna Zalizniak (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow)
Discussant: Johan Van der Auwera (University of Antwerp)