Scienze dell'antichità, filologico-letterarie e storico-artistiche

EDUCATION
• 2001: MA degree (cum laude) in Historical Linguistics, Sapienza University of Rome (MA thesis on Gothic).
• 2001, 2003: SIG Summer school of Historical Lingusitics, at University of Udine.
• 2005: PhD degree (with a thesis on Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī), Sapienza University of Rome

TEACHING AND RESEARCH EMPLOYMENT
• 2005–2006, 2007, 2008: Post-doc research grantee at Faculty of the Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome
• 2009: Teaching assistant (Contratto integrativo) of Historical linguistics, Faculty of the Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome
• 2010: Teaching assistant (Lettore madrelingua TD) of Russian, Faculty of Humanities, University of L'Aquila
• 2011–2014: Assistant professor (Ricercatore universitario non confermato TI) of Historical and General Linguistics (SSD L-LIN/01), Italian Institute of Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome
• 2015–present: Assistant professor with confirmation (Ricercatore universitario TI confermato) of Historical and General Linguistics (SSD L-LIN/01), Italian Institute of Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome

PAPERS ACCEPTED AT PEER-REVIEWED CONFERENCES
• '«Fixed» vs. «shifting» words: linguistic and philosophical viewpoints', LCM VI: Inside/Out: Practice and Representation, 23–26/06/2014, Lublin, Poland
• (with Elisa Freschi) "What is the goal one has in view while editing a philosophical work?", 15th World Sanskrit Conference, 5–10/01/2012, New Delhi, Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan
• "Possessive predicates from Archaic Latin to the Romance languages: an issue of topicality and word order?", Workshop: Variation and Change in Argument Realization, 27–30/05/2010, Università di Napoli
• "Pāṇinīya tradition as a source for the study of the MI labile verbs", ISTAL 19th. International Symposium on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 3–5/04/2009, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
• "Stratifications in Pāṇiniʼs kāraka theory: a functionalist approach", ICHoLS XI: International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, 28/08–2/09/2008, Universität Potsdam

OTHER QUALIFICATIONS
• Member of SIG – Società Italiana di Glottologia
• Chief editor of the journal Rivista degli Studi Sudasiatici
• Founding member of the Coffee Break Project (http://asiatica.wikispaces.com/Coffee+Break+Project)

ADDITIONS TO THE LIST OF PUBLICATIONS
• 'Some Metasemiotic Remarks on Translation and Translatability'. Open Linguistics 2015 (in print)
• (with E. Freschi) 'Understanding a philosophical text: the problem of “meaning” in Jayanta’s Nyayamañjarī, book 5', P. McAllister et al. (eds.), Jayanta on Buddhist Nominalism, Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2015 (in print)
• 'Form, meaning and the textual criticism of Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī'. Bulletin d'Études Indiennes 32 (2015)

Progetti di Ricerca Medi : 180 progetti finanziati da 10.000 a 15.000 euro(*)

The present research aims at attaining several theoretical, methodological and practical purposes. It is intended to span over more than one year of team work, of which the present application covers the second year and attempts at discussing and solving some of the theoretical problems that arose during the first year of research (Sapienza grant n. C26A14F4ZM), and especially those discussed with the Indo-European scholars who took part in the workshop on branch-crossing isoglosses organized by the principal investigator in 2014 (Sapienza grant n. C26C134CZ4).

The ultimate goal is to collect and classify the "branch-crossing" isoglosses with the Indo-European family of languages, with special regards to "second generation" languages which share common features that cannot be traced to a common ancestor. In case we succeed in this task, a new contact-based areal approach to the study of the Indo-European linguistics will be strongly improved.

In order to achieve our goals, stages of the project have been identified as follows:

1) Collecting primary data.
2) Creating database to contain the data.
3) Implementing an algorithm for the graphical representation of the multidimensional data under consideration.
4) Populating the database, possibly with the contribution of the "crowd" (in this case: the community of Indo-Europeanists).
5) Implementing an algorithm for automatic isogloss detection.
6) Evaluating the topology of the obtained isoglosses in comparison with the traditional geography of the IE languages.

The research intended for the present grant application covers part of the workload foreseen within the initial stages of the list above. We are planning to develop a database model and to start the data collecting. We will be primarily gathering phonological data from the most relevant ancient IE languages. Some morphological and syntactical features will be also tested for the possibility of implementing them into the general database.

COMPUTATIONAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE

The present proposal aims at improving the investigation of the genetic relationships between the languages of the Indo-European (IE) family by suggesting a computational instrument for the study and the presentation of the divergent and, especially, convergent isoglosses.

Divergent phenomena

The application of computational methods is not new in this field, but it has hitherto mainly focused on the creation of algorithms that would justify the traditional output of the divergent tree approach to linguistic change, also called "Tree model", which has predominated in the IE studies since A. Schleicher (1862) onwards. After a recent proposal of a statistically based formalization of the historical-comparative method (Ringe 1992), different computational methods are being largely used in the Phylogenetic analysis of cognate languages: automatic tree detection and construction. Such trees are acyclic and binary branching. Their terminal nodes (or leaves), corresponding to historical languages, are — in most cases — easily mappable to geographical, and often also historical data. We term this condition geo-historical bias, which amounts to say that, for a higher node corresponding to a geographical region and a known point in the history, there is a tendency, for its children nodes, to be located in sub-regions of that region, and to be chronologically younger than that historical point. It can be observed that the results of the computational tree construction (e.g. Gray & Atkinson 2003) have been generally consistent with this geo-historical bias, and when they are not, linguists tend not to consider the computational results as crucial as to cause a paradigm shift.

Convergent phenomena

What is still missing is an algorithm for detection of horizontal borrowings between different branches of the IE family, as these phenomena have remained outside the mainstream Indo-European studies, even if they are widely debated and collected since J. Schmidt (1872) pointed them out for the first time. Convergent phenomena resist the tree-oriented modelization, because they lead to cyclicity. They are also in odds with the geo-historical bias, since they usually spread across the traditional branching of the IE tree, so that transversal, but not necessarily uninterrupted, linguistic areas appear (for example, /s/ > /h/ is a change attested in a region formed by some Indian, Iranian, Greek, Anatolian and Armenian varieties, see Gusmani 1972).

The study of convergent phenomena within the IE family is not unprecedented, but a general investigation, data collection and methodological refinement are still a desideratum. After a decades-long debate concerning the model of the linguistic change (for instance, "Tree model" vs. "Wave model", see Goebl 1983, Höfler 1955), as well as areal- and dialect-oriented studies of the IE languages (see Meillet 1922 and also Lazzeroni 1987 for a survey of the question), the convergent phenomena start now to be finally analyzed by computational scholars as well (see Nichols & Warnow 2008, Barbançon et al 2013). Instead of the tree, a network-shaped representation has been proposed in order to describe them phylogenetically (see McMahon & McMahon 2005).

In our project, we suggest a different approach to convergent phenomena. While the automatic tree constructing algorithms try to reproduce the traditional IE tree through a mathematical analysis of primary, usually lexical, data, in our approach we depart from ascertained regular correspondences (mostly phonological and morphological) in order to facilitate the detection of borrowings and contact-induced facts.

THE STUDY OF ISOGLOSSES

The notion of isogloss is central for this research. By this term is usually meant any kind of linguistic feature that is shared by two or more languages and, ideally, not shared by others within the same linguistic family. The common features can arise for one of the following reasons:

1) common innovations from the ancestor language;
2) horizontal borrowings;
3) random coincidences.

The isoglosses of type (1) are the divergent ones, allowing the creation of phylogenetic trees. Those of type (2) are the ones we call convergent isoglosses; they may have multiple origin, such as: direct borrowing from one sister language to another, common borrowing from one "substrate" to two, or more, receiving languages. Casual developments (3) can be further subdivided as wel into those resulting from a common drift vs. completely random matches.

Another traditional distinction, i.e. that holding between "innovative" and "conservative" isoglosses, can be reformulated in terms of complementary subsets within the set of IE languages: an innovation creates a new subset of languages, while the remaining ones form the conservative isogloss.

The objective of our project is to create a thesaurus (under the form of an online resource) that will contain all the known isoglosses attested within the IE family under the form of a inheritance vectors tree going from the IE phonemes and morphemes to the phonology/morphology of historically attested languages. Primary linguistic data, the so-called regular correspondences (from which the divergent isoglosses take origin), will be collected from the preceding scholarly literature without being questioned. This material is largely known and available from surveys such as Brugmann & Delbrück's Grundriß and the like. The convergent isoglosses, on the other hand, have to be retrieved manually since, far from being unknown to linguists, they have never been collected into general surveys.

The following is a list of a selection of convergent isoglosses that exemplifies our approach.

Phonology

– loss of the qualitative distinction between /a/ and /o/ in the whole IE domain except for the Hellenic and Italic groups;
– RUKI-law in Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic (Lubotsky 1999, Beguš 2012) and perhaps in Germanic (see Prescott 2012);
– creation of a back spirant (/h/ or the like), from different sources, in many languages;
– palatalization of velar stops in Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian domains.

Morphology

– creation of a new adjectival declension (Balto-Slavic, Germanic);
– adding of pronominal terminations to nominal stems (Prakrits, Balto-Slavic and sporadically some others);
– increasing productivity of the velar suffix < IE *-ko (Middle Iranian, Slavic, Latin, Greek, Germanic; importantly lacking in Hittite, see Ciancaglini 2012);
– increase in number of nominal cases (Tocharian, Middle and New Indo-Aryan, Armenian, Baltic and Slavic), perhaps under the pressure of some substrates (see Kulikov 2011).

PRELIMINARY RESULTS

The first stage of the present research (funded by a Sapienza research grant in 2014) was devoted to discussing the primary data under consideration with the scholarly community. The principal investigator presented the main ideas of this project to an international conference in Saint Petersburg in 2013 (see Keidan 2013), attracting the interest of several scholars of IE languages and stimulating a very productive discussion. The discussion continued in the occasion of a workshop, organized by the principal investigator in Rome in 2014, and devoted especially to the question of the convergent isoglosses (see http://asiatica.wikispaces.com/CBC5).
Furthermore, a first attempt to create a prototype of the database has been made thanks to the collaboration of a database architect funded from the 2014 grant. The results, although not yet accessible openly, can be previewed online: http://www.isoglosses.info/hidden

SYNTHESIS OF THE RESEARCH PROGRAM

Project steps

The ultimate goal of the general project, of which the present proposal constitutes its second year of research, is to study the convergent, branch-crossing, isoglosses of the second generation IE languages, possibly establishing some previously unknown linguistic areas within this domain. See more details in the research program granted with Sapienza research funds 2014 (project n. C26A14F4ZM).

For the time being, our aim is that of creating a online open resource containing the following data:

– Phonological system of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (with at least two phonetic interpretations: traditional and glottalic).
– Complete phonological descriptions of the daughter languages and, possibly, some of the second generation daughter languages (such as Prakrits).
– Information about the regular correspondences between IE and daughter languages.
– A database with a selection of diverging and converging isoglosses, under the form of stored queries involving all the aspects of the above mentioned data.
– An online interface for the insertion of new proposals of isoglosses from the online users.
– A graphic engine that will represent the isoglosses on an idealized map and will also give the possibility to preview the branch-crossing converging isoglosses.

Note that phonological repertoires together with the tree of correspondence amount to the ascertained knowledge produced after 200 years of IE studies. These data per se do not constitute the goal of the present project since we are not proposing any revision of the traditional IE Tree model based on divergent isoglosses. Instead, we mean to produce a heuristic tool that will help the scholars to visualize the known data and to hypothesize previously unknown converging isoglosses.

Parallel to Phonology, there will be a testing of an extention of the database to data from Morphology, which are comparatively far more complicated, but are also crucial for many known convergent isoglosses.

Modeling the isoglosses

One of the main practical problems to be solved at this stage is the formalization of the notion of isogloss. Given a database of phonological properties of IE languages (described in terms of phonological features), together with the tree of inheritance from the protolanguage, an isogloss can be thought of as a query that filters a subset from the linguistic data. The parameters taken into account for every searchable phoneme will be:

– presence or absence of an inheritance vector;
– presence or absence of a phonological feature;
– relative chronology.
– degree of attestedness.

Every isogloss entry will be mapped on a pseudo-geographical map. This visualization will topologically conserve the information about inheritance and will represent also the information about branch-crossing features. One of the main goals of the present research is to question the geo-historical bias (see §2.4) and to individuate possible linguistic areas that contradict our traditional view of the history of IE languages.

Technical solutions

Primary data will be conserved in the form of a non-relational database. Queries will be possible through a specific online interface. A selection of prestored queries-isoglosses will be also available for the end-users. The subsets of languages filtered by such queries will be graphically plotted onto a pseudo-geographic map. In this way the isoglosses will be easily viewable and evaluable.

Mathematical supervision

The specificity of this project requires a mathematical supervision of the pursued goals. A general model will be provided for the isogloss identification and weighing, through algebraic and graph-theoretic methods.

Populating the database

The main task of the project is populating the database with records of convergent isoglosses. On one hand, they will be collected from the existing scholarly literature. On the other hand, team members will contribute themselves. We also wish to open the database to external contribution, which will be moderated and edited by the team.

Every record will contain an algorithmic description of the isogloss together with a reference to an external source or an array of examples in order to demonstrate its correctness.

INDIVIDUAL TASKS OF THE TEAM MEMBERS

The present project involves some excellent international scholars and opens the participation to online contributors. It is based on a team of specialists coming from Sapienza University, and a few additional participants from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Laboratory for Computational and Statistical Learning), Russian Academy of Sciences (Institute of Linguistics, Saint Petersburg) and School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London).

The team members have been selected according to their past experience in the IE studies, and, for the technical part, in the field of data analysis and representation, statistics and language automation. The linguists involved in the program will contribute to populate the isogloss database with data from languages of which they are most skilled. The linguistic team in its entirety covers practically the whole domain of the IE family of languages.

The official team members (A. Keidan, C. A. Ciancaglini, L. Alfieri, F. Pinto) will support the main part of the work, discussing the theoretical and applicative problems, and effectively contribute to building and populating the database. The additional participants (P. Kocharov, R. G. Gattodoro, E. Cecini) will be involved only when needed, with specific and limited tasks depending on their personal skills.

Artemij Keidan

Being the principal investigator of the present project, he will coordinate the team work, especially bridging its IT-side with the linguistic one. He will collaborate with the technical grantee in projecting, implementing testing and publishing the isogloss database. He will also contribute to populate the database with data from such languages as: Prakrits and Late Sanskrit (including the information provided by the indigenous grammarians), Germanic (especially Gothic), Slavic (especially Old Slavonic and Old Russian). Eventually he will also coordinate the expansion of the database to include morphological data.

Claudia A. Ciancaglini

Having devoted her research activity over the last few years to the areas of Iranian (Ancient and Middle), Greek and Tocharian, she will contribute to populating the database with data from those languages and will also participate into the expansion of the database to morphology. Thus, she will focus on the history of some innovation in the derivational morphology that are attested in many branches of the "second generation" IE languages but are extremely rare, or even unattested, in the oldest IE languages. One such feature is, e.g., the derivational suffix in velar (IE *-ko-). This suffix, exhibiting many different and hardly clusterable functions (the most important of which seems to be the adjectival derivation), is very well attested in Classical Sanskrit, in the Middle Iranian varieties, in Slavic and Germanic languages, and also in Latin and Greek. However, it is almost completely lacking in the oldest phases of the IE family (two examples in Gathic Avestan and only one in Hittite; very few in Old Persian), see Ciancaglini (2012).

Luca Alfieri

Being a specialist in Indo-Iranian languages as well as Armenian, Latin and Greek, he will cover the data collection within these subgroups of the IE family. Furthermore, he will be more specifically focusing on the morphosyntactic isoglosses concerning the evolution of the IE parts-of-speech systems, and particularly with the adjectives. The Proto-IE parts-of-speech system is only preserved in Vedic and Avestan and differs from that found in Latin, Germanic and in all of the other Western IE languages (see Alfieri 2009; 2011). While Vedic displays only about a score of primary adjective stems, Latin shows three classes of primary lexemes (noun, verb and adjective), and typically encodes the quality predicate and the quality modifier through a primary adjective stem.

Francesca Pinto

Being a specialist in Phonology, she will supervise the articulatory and acoustic description of the reconstructed IE phonological system(s). Indeed, two phonological approaches have been suggested in such respect: the "traditional" one, dating back to the Neogrammarians, and the "glottalic" one, independently suggested some decades ago by Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (1973) and Hopper (1973). She will collaborate with the IT-side of the project in implementing these phonological aspects into the database and the visualization engine.

Roberta G. Gattodoro

Being an expert in Sanskrit, Tocharian, as well as in areal contacts of the IE with other languages of Asia, especially Chinese, she will contribute to populate the database with data from these languages, with a special concern for the substrate-induced and other areal phenomena.

Petr Kocharov

Being a specialist in Armenian and Celtic, he will contribute to populating the database with data from these languages. Furthermore he will also focus on some parallel morphological innovations attested in these areas of IE in order to test the morphological expansion of the database.

Enrico Cecini

Being a specialist in Artificial Intelligence and mathematical methods in language processing he will participate in building and implementing the database and especially the visualizing engine, which demands for skills in topology and statistics.

Scholarship grantee

In case a scholarship will be granted, the scholarship holder will devote his whole activity to the reviewing and the data collection from the preceding scholarly literature. This cannot be considered a purely mechanical procedure, since it presuppose an appropriate understanding of the theoretical framework on which the present project is based, as well as the capacity of applying it to the analysis of particular linguistic facts. The resulting data will populate the projected database of isoglosses.

Technical laborer

The massive IT-orientedness of this project requires the collaboration of a specialist in database and related technologies, as well as in creating online interactive resources who will be hired with the funds of the project. The grantee will deliver a working resource, including the database and the visualization engine, after discussing the details of the abstract model of data with the linguist members of the team and the mathematical supervisor.

REFERENCES

L. Alfieri, 'La categoria dell’aggettivo in vedico', Archivio Glottologico Italiano 94/1 (2009): 3–49
— 'A Radical Construction Grammar approach to Vedic adjective', Rivista degli Studi Orientali 84 (2011): 247–261
R. Gray & Q. Atkinson, 'Language tree divergences support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin', Nature 426 (2003): 435–439
F. Barbançon et al., 'An experimental study comparing linguistic phylogenetic reconstruction methods', Diachronica 30/2 (2013): 143–170
G. Beguš, 'The RUKI-Rule and Some Related Topics in Indo-Iranian Phonology'. 2012 [MA thesis]
K. Brugmann & B. Delbrück, Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. Strassburg: Trübner, 1886–1900
C. Ciancaglini, 'Outcomes of the Indo-Iranian Suffix *-ka- in Old Persian and Avestan', G. P. Basello & A. V. Rossi (eds.), Dariosh Studies II. Persepolis and its Settlements: Territorial System and Ideology in the Achaemenid State: 77–86. Napoli, 2012
T. Gamkrelidze & V. Ivanov, Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A reconstruction and historical analysis of a proto-language and a proto-culture, Berlin & New York, 1994–1995 (Engl. tranls. of the 1973 ed.)
H. Goebl, '«Stammbaum» und «Welle». Vergleichende Betrachtungen aus numerisch-taxonomischer Sicht', Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 2 (1983): 3–44
R. Gusmani, 'A proposito del passaggio s > h in iranico, greco ecc.', Archivio Glottologico Italiano 57 (1972): 10–23
O. Höfler, 'Stammbaumtheorie, Wellentheorie, Entfaltungstheorie', Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 77 (1955): 424–476
P. J. Hopper, 'Glottalized and murmured occlusives in Indo-European', Glossa 7/2 (1973): 141–166
A. Keidan, ‘Branch-crossing Indo-European isoglosses: a call for interest’, Materialy čtenij pamjati I. M. Tronskogo 17 (2013): 406–417.
L. Kulikov, 'The Proto-Indo-European case system and its reflexes in a diachronic typological perspective: Evidence for the linguistic prehistory of Eurasia', Rivista degli Studi Orientali 84 (2011): 289–309
R. Lazzeroni, 'Meillet indoeuropeista', A. Quattordio Moreschini (ed), L'opera scientifica di Antoine Meillet: 83-95. Pisa: Giardini, 1987
A. Lubotsky, 'Avestan compounds and the RUKI-rule', H. Eichner et al. (eds.), Compositiones indogermanicae in memoriam Jochem Schindler: 299–322. Praha: Enigma Corporation, 1999
A. McMahon & R. McMahon, Language Classification by Numbers. Oxford University Press, 2005.
A. Meillet, Les dialectes indo-européenns. Paris: É. Champion, 1922
J. Nichols & T. Warnow, 'Tutorial on Computational Linguistic Phylogeny', Language and Linguistics Compass 2/5 (2008): 760–820
Ch. Prescott, 'Germanic and the ruki Dialects', Copenhagen Studies in Indo-European 4: 381–389. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012
D. Ringe, 'On Calculating the Factor of Chance in Language Comparison', Transactions of the American Philosophical Society NS 82/1 (1992): 1–110
A. Schleicher, Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1862
J. Schmidt, Die Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse der indogermanischen Sprachen. Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1872
H. Schuhardt, Slawo-deutsches und Slawo-italienisches. Graz: Leuschner & Lubensky, 1884

CONSUNTIVO PER IL FINANZIAMENTO RICERCA 2012

Il gruppo di ricerca, composto da Artemij Keidan, Claudia Ciancaglini e Luca Alfieri, ha lavorato su vari aspetti della morfologia delle lingue indoeuropee orientali (in primis indiane e iraniche). Ciascuno ha privilegiato un proprio settore di interesse, ma il lavoro di tutti è stato accomunato da una particolare attenzione alle informazioni provenienti dalle fonti grammaticali antiche e all'aspetto diacronico dello sviluppo della morfologia nel tempo.

I risultati raggiunti sono stati pubblicati, oppure sono in fase di pubblicazione, su riviste di rilievo internazionale provviste di peer review.

In particolare, i partecipanti hanno svolto i seguenti compiti.

Artemij Keidan

– Ha perfezionato la stesura e preparato per la stampa un lavoro sulla stratificazione nel pensiero di Panini riguardo la morfologia flessionale del sanscrito.
– Ha sviluppato l'approccio multidisciplinare al pensiero grammaticale indiano antico tramite lo studio del grammatico Jayanta, sull'interpretazione del pensiero del quale ha preparato (in collaborazione con la Dott.ssa Elisa Freschi, Accademia delle Scienze di Vienna, Austria), in stampa.
– Ha svolto il lavoro di editor per una recente e innovativa grammatica dello slavo antico: A. Polivanova, "Staroslavjanskij jazyk. Grammatika. Slovari", pubblicato a Mosca (Russia), Univ. "Dmitrij Pozharskij", 2013.
– Ha ultimato un lavoro sulla storia della morfologia verbale (in relazione al problema dei cosiddetti verbi labili) nelle lingue indoarie (sanscrito e le varietà medio-indiane), che è stato pubblicato su "Lingusitics", rivista internazionale con peer review.
– Nell'ultima fase del periodo di ricerca ha proposto un nuovo framework per lo studio delle lingue indoeuropee del periodo medio, ossia quello delle "isoglosse trasversali"; tale framework è stato presentato, sotto forma di "call for interest", in occasione del convegno internazionale di indoeuropeistica "Tronsky Lectures" tenutosi a San Pietroburgo (Russia), il 22 giugno 2013.
– Ha organizzato un workshop, finanziato tramite l'apposito bando dell'Ateneo, riguardante il nuovo framework proposto, tenutosi a Roma il 22 maggio 2014, con la partecipazione di numerosi relatori di livello internazionale.
– Ha invitato, vincendo l'apposito bando dell'Ateneo, il Prof. Alexander Lubotsky (Università di Leida, Olanda), uno dei più importanti studiosi di indoeuropeistica di oggi, come visiting professor presso l'Istituto Italiano di Studi Orientali, organizzando una serie di seminari aperti sia al pubblico specialistico che agli studenti e dottorandi (aprile – giugno 2014). In tale occasione molti aspetti teorici e pratici del nuovo framework vengono discussi con interlocutori di altissimo livello.

Claudia A. Ciancaglini

– Ha approfondito lo studio della suffissazione nelle lingue indoeuropee, in particolare, del suffisso in velare nelle lingue del gruppo indo-iranico; i primi risultati di questi studi sono stati pubblicati in numerosi articoli su riviste internazionali
– Un volume monografico su tale argomento è in fase di revisione. Per la pubblicazione del volume in questione, intitolato "The development of the velar suffixes in the Indo-Iranian languages and their Proto-Indo- European ancestors", è stata contattata la casa editrice Harrassowitz (Wiesbaden, Germania), con cui l'autrice ha collaborato in diverse occasioni in passato.

Luca Alfieri

– Ha indagato il significato sincronico del concetto di "radice" e i rapporti tra la tipologia degli aggettivi e il concetto di "radice", dimostrando che è possibile istituire un’equivalenza funzionale tra le lingue “con radici” e le lingue “senza aggettivi”.
– Ha, inoltre, dimostrato che l’ipotesi indoeuropea di Bopp si può assimilare a una vera e propria rivoluzione scientifica nel senso tradizionalmente kuhniano del termine e che questa rivoluzione è consistita nel passaggio del concetto di radice dalla grammatica indigena araba e indiana alla linguistica occidentale.
– Infine, si è interessato alla teoria delle parti del discorso nella grammatica greco-latina e a problemi di contatto linguistico in area siro-greco-iranica.