Professor Merja Stenroos presents the research project LiTra, which has been awarded the EU's most prestigious grant
We know remarkably little about the early history that formed the known European languages and cultures. While advances in genetics have led to new debates about population histories, they cannot tell us about the languages spoken. In the absence of written records, language appears ephemeral: changes through time seemingly erase all traces of earlier speech.
Such erasures are not, however, complete, as language change always leaves behind a tail of residual forms. A new five-year project at UiS (LiTra), funded by the European Research Council (ERC), will focus on the small patterns of low-frequency forms that are generally ignored by linguists, and explore their potential to provide linguistic ‘fingerprints’ that make possible the reconstruction of much earlier language and population history.
We will study the spread of linguistic and cultural groups in early England − Celtic, Scandinavian and West Germanic − through the patterning of minority variants (‘micro-patterns’) in later texts. The project will combine the study of historical documents with new corpus annotation methods based on deep learning technology. This talk will outline the main ideas behind the project, which starts in January 2025, and discuss some preliminary examples
Merja Stenroos is a Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Stavanger. LiTra is the first research project affiliated with UiS to be awarded a grant from the European Research Council (ERC).
Language: English
Breakfast will be served
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