37.1885, Reviews: Comparing Linguistic Diachronies: Nikolaos Lavidas, Alexander Bergs, Elly van Gelderen, & Ioanna Sitaridou (eds.) (2025)

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Subject: 37.1885, Reviews: Comparing Linguistic Diachronies: Nikolaos Lavidas, Alexander Bergs, Elly van Gelderen, & Ioanna Sitaridou (eds.) (2025)

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Date: 25-May-2026
From: Kurt Erbach [kurt.erbach at proton.me]
Subject: Anthropological Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, General Linguistics, Sociolinguistics: Nikolaos Lavidas, Alexander Bergs, Elly van Gelderen, & Ioanna Sitaridou (eds.) (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-3804

Title: Comparing Linguistic Diachronies
Subtitle: The Naxos Papers (Volume III)
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
           http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/
Book URL:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/comparing-linguistic-diachronies-9781350516335/

Editor(s): Nikolaos Lavidas, Alexander Bergs, Elly van Gelderen, &
Ioanna Sitaridou

Reviewer: Kurt Erbach

SUMMARY
Comparing Linguistic Diachronies contains an introduction to, and a
collection of papers based on, presentations at the 2022 and 2023
editions of the Comparing Diachronies workshops at the Language
Variation and Change in Ancient and Medieval Europe—Comparing
Diachronies summer school held in Naxos, Greece. The volume seems to
be intended for a general audience, that is, for anyone from readers
with a passing interest in languages and linguistics to researchers
whose agendas include any of the languages or phenomena targeted in
the empirical studies in the contributed chapters.
The introduction (by Nikolaos Lavidas, Alexander Bergs, Elly van
Gelderen, and Ioanna Sitaridou) contains an accessible summary of the
summer school responsible for bringing this research together, as well
as the status of diachronic linguistics, its relevance to general
linguistics, and an outline of the papers contained in the volume. The
summer school and its workshop are said to be concerned with in depth
discussions of ongoing research of all scholars of diachronic
linguistics, and the variety seen within the volume is a testament to
this. The status of diachronic linguistics is framed primarily in
terms of value for language learning and use: examples are taken from
English and include explaining grammatical and lexical idiosyncrasies
and understanding end-rhyme in Early Modern poetry. The relevance of
diachronic studies to general linguistics focuses on the ways in which
it supports the generative agenda, for example the way a locality
principle, Minimal Search, which looks for the nearest goal (e.g.
labeling in a phrase), can be taken as an explanation for why certain
prepositions were reanalyzed as complementizers in the history of
English (see also van Gelderen 2022). The contributed papers to this
volume are few, but their topics and languages of foci diverse:
modality in the history of Hebrew, grief and fear verbs in Ancient
Greek, code-switching in Early Modern English, the gender of nouns
borrowed from Italo-Romance into Heptanesian (Greek), and verbal
morphosyntax in Gothic.
Chapter 2. Negative “Might” and “Easy” Shifts in Hebrew, by Bar
Avineri. This chapter presents an investigation into the use of the
modal ‘alul (‘may’/‘might’) across the history of Hebrew in an attempt
to shed light on its two peculiar characteristics in present-day use:
first, it only has one modal flavor (epistemic) as opposed to
multiple; second, it has negative associations. After substantiating
these and further characteristics of ‘alul, Avineri looks at uses
across Classical, Medieval, and Pre-Modern Hebrew including the
revival. It is shown that the first occurrences occur in
post-Biblical, Classical Hebrew in a dispositional function. It later
developed an epistemic meaning, both negative and neutral, and its use
was expanded even further though many of these uses eventually
disappeared. It is hypothesized that the classical dispositional use,
which resembled an ‘easy’ construction—e.g. That hill is easy to
climb—along with standardization efforts in Modern Hebrew led to the
reanalysis of ‘alul from a somewhat opaque modal to one with
exclusively epistemic flavor and negative evaluation. This claim is
supported by many parallel cases of grammatical change discussed
throughout the chapter.
Chapter 3. The Verbs of Grief and Fear in the Ancient Greek Tragedy
Plays and Oratory Speeches, by Anastasia Tsiropina. This chapter
presents a quantitative and qualitative corpus study on the topic
specified in the title, and it discusses the results within the
context of previous claims about their respective differences, their
association with men and women, and their use in self talk. The
quantitative portion of the study focuses on the frequency of various
‘grief’ and ‘fear’ verbs in the respective genres and the percentage
pertaining to the first person (less than 50% overall per genre). The
qualitative portion considers who is describing the fear or grief of
whom and in what sort of context. While certain ‘grief’ verbs do not
have overlapping use—e.g. some expressing ‘feeling pain and distress
due to unpleasantness’ versus others expressing ‘indignation’—‘fear’
verbs are seen to be overwhelmingly overlapping in their use, and both
sets are seen to pertain to both male and female characters in tragedy
plays, while oratory is almost exclusively about men. Altogether, this
study serves to support several existing theories about these words
and their associations and to undermine others.
Chapter 4. Code-Switching in English Merchants’ Writings: The Johnson
Correspondence, by Carmela Perta. The goal of this chapter is to
present a micro-level sociolinguistic analysis of code-switching in
the Early Modern English letters written by members of the Johnson
family found in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (Nevalainen
& Raumolin-Brunberg 1996). Compared to a previous, macro-level
analysis which compares languages used and the social groups to which
the writers belonged, the current study looks more closely at the
instances of code-switching and categorizes them to understand the
motivations behind their use. For example, several instances are data
labels (e.g. dates, quantities), several instances follow
foreign-language honorific titles, and others seem to be motivated by
attempts to conceal information from unintended readers or to exhibit
a close personal relationship with the recipient. One section of the
chapter is dedicated to a particularly peculiar instance of
code-switching, which has been characterized as Italian by others,
though the status of this characterization is questioned considering
the writer’s personal history and linguistic tendencies.
Chapter 5. At the Morphological-Syntactic Crossroads: Unveiling the
Forces Shaping Neuter Assignment in Heptanesian Borrowing from
Italo-Romance, by Vasiliki Makri. This chapter looks at the extent to
which there is systamticity in the way grammatical gender has been
assigned to nouns borrowed from Italo-Romance into Heptanesian. The
chapter summarizes discussions of language contact with a particular
focus on the history of Italo-Romance and Greek contact from the late
14th to early 19th century. The chapter also summarizes literature
discussing that nature of grammatical gender and notions of a
‘default’ gender. The empirical portion consists of a characterization
of the aforementioned nouns as seen in the author’s specifically
constructed databases and further digitized resources from the
Laboratory of Modern Greek Dialects of the University of Patras. With
the available evidence, the author argues for a gender-assignment
algorithm wherein a noun being -ANIMATE and phonologically
incompatible with other Heptanesian inflectional classes result in
borrowed words being encoded with neuter gender, though this can later
change for various analogical reasons.
Chapter 6. The Influence of Greek on the Gothic Verbal Morphto-Syntax:
Comparing Cross-Linguistic Evidence on Written Contact in the Pauline
Epistles to the Corinthians, by Sofia Chionidi. This chapter presents
a comparative study of the titular section of the Gothic Bible along
with the Greek source text and translations from Middle, Early Modern,
and Present Day English. This study aims to compare the extent to
which the syntactic patterns in the Gothic Bible were potentially
driven by Greek given the status of Greek as a lingua franca during
Antiquity (see, e.g. Darchia 2012) and the possibility that the
translator, Wulfila, was a bilingual speaker of the two (Ratkus 2009).
The main assumption is that typological similarities and differences
between the Greek text and the various English texts can shed light on
the extent to which the Gothic translation may be influenced by the
Greek source text. The results of both a machine-learning and human
categorization of verb phrase morphosyntax are argued to fail to
provide direct evidence of transfer from Greek to Gothic given the
lack of similarities between the two.
EVALUATION
The collection presents a diverse set of studies in terms of method,
language, and phenomenon of focus. Each of the papers discusses their
phenomena of interest in straightforward, ground-up ways, which should
make the content quite accessible to a more novice reader. This
accessibility ties the chapters of the volume together, along with
their origin as presentations in in the Comparing Diachronies
workshop, even though the foci of each chapter are quite different.
Each also discusses potential future work that could build on the
present research. The volume could be well used in a course surveying
contemporary topics and methods in diachronic linguistic research,
albeit with one caveat: not all chapters in the volume are, strictly
speaking, diachronic. Rather, some are synchronic studies of earlier
varieties of languages, which require further knowledge of these
languages and their diachronies in order to round out their
contributions to the field. Apart from Chapter 6, which presents a
machine-learning-based study, the rest of the empirical methods
described throughout the book are fairly commonplace in diachronic
linguistics at this point, namely using purpose-built or publicly
available corpora and a mix of frequentist and qualitative methods for
analysis. The nature of the work makes the book easy to navigate for
relatively inexperience readers, while also provides interesting case
studies for the more informed researcher. Compared to a handbook,
which this volume in no way pretends to be, this volume does not
necessarily review the primary topics in diachronic linguistics nor
the state of the art per se. However, given that the majority of the
contributed chapters are written by early career researchers, it
certainly provides a sample of research that exemplifies where the
field may be headed.
REFERENCES
Darchia, I. (2012), Hellenistik Koine and Modern Global Languages,
Phasis, 15-16.
Gelderen, E. V. (2022), Third Factors in Syntactic Variation and
Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nevalainen, T., & Raumolin-Brunberg, H. (1996), The corpus of Early
English correspondence, LANGUAGE AND COMPUTERS, 15, 39-56.
Ratkus, A. (2020), The (Non-)Existence of the Middle Voice in Gothic:
In Search of a Mirage, Transactions of the Philological Society, 118
(2): 263-303. DOI: 10.1111/1467-968X.12190.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Kurt Erbach is currently a researcher in the University of Galway
School of English, Media and Creative Arts. He is also completing a
Habilitation at Saarland University on the diachrony of partitive and
pseudo-partitive phrases in English. He has also published on
countability, race talk, and gesture.



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