Temporal analysis and modelling of the paradimgatic extension of French and Italian verbal roots

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Sascha Gaglia
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 322463161

The project investigates the empirical, feature- as well as frequency-based dimension of paradigmatic analogies within verbal roots on the basis of quantitative data with respect to the development from Old French to Early Modern French and from Old Tuscan to Early Modern Italian. Research questions: a. What can be said about the extension of a root within a paradigm from a temporal perspective? b. Is it possible to generalize extensional paths? c. Can these paths be modeled on the grounds of i) morpho-syntactic or morpho-semantic features, ii) usagea-based frequency? The documentation of the material as well as my methodological approach and my theoretical claims exceed previous works in this field: a) the time frame of the project is wider (1100-1700), b) hence, there will be a greater amount of data to be investigated (coming from different, very big corpora), c) my theoretical claims are innovative due to the combination of a feature-based and a frequency-based perspective, d) the project is comparative since it analyses two languages, e) the questions raised are innovative - in principle and especially with respect to French and Italian. Regarding French, until now, only one study raised the question of analogical paths, but only for a small group of verbs and for only one single manuscript. There is no such work for Italian. The project shall fill these gaps and smooth the way for similar studies regarding other languages. I m expecting new impulses for research in Romance/French/Italian linguistics and inflectional/paradigmatic morphology. At the same time, one of the central aims of the project is the documentation of different diachronic steps with respect to analogies. The data will be presented within an interactive internet database that can be used by linguists coming from different theoretical backgrounds.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants