Project description
Studying the evolution of linguistic categories
Linguistic categories help humans organise and interpret the world, with categorisers – markers of nouns, verbs and adjectives – forming core components of the mental lexicon. The ERC-funded EVOCAT project seeks to establish the principles governing the formation, representation and historical development of categories and categorisers through large-scale analysis of categorisation morphology in ancient Indo-European languages and their descendants. Its core hypothesis is that categorisers arise and change via directional reanalysis, yielding uniform developments across languages and language families. By comparing these patterns in unrelated languages, the project aims to uncover universal rules of human grammar. This will provide new insights into the building blocks of human language and inform the study of language change and the cognitive basis of the language faculty.
Objective
Linguistic categories serve as cognitive tools for humans to organize, understand, and navigate the complex world around them. Categorizers - elements that formally mark lexical categories such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives - belong to the core building blocks of the mental lexicon. However, it is still unclear how and why new categories and categorizers arise and how their function changes over time. Bridging the gap between disciplines, the EVOCAT project aims to unravel this puzzle by uncovering the underlying principles that govern the formation, representation, and evolution of linguistic categories. Based on a large-scale quantitative and qualitative analysis of categorization morphology in the ancient Indo-European (IE) languages and their descendants, EVOCAT’s goal is to uncover how categorizers shape the mental lexicon, how they change over time, and how their evolution can be exploited for the purposes of phylogenetic reconstruction. The project's core hypothesis is that the rise and development of new categorizers proceeds via strictly directional reanalysis of morphological material, which predicts that categorizers develop in a uniform manner cross-linguistically and that this development gives rise to meaningful isoglosses that distinguish different subbranches of related languages from one another. This hypothesis will moreover be tested against data from non-IE languages with a comparable time span of attestation to show that it truly holds cross-linguistically. Discovering regularities and establishing universals in the domain of the mental lexicon will lead to ground-breaking insights into the nature of the categorial building blocks of human grammar. This ambitious project will provide the crucial empirical and theoretical basis for further research at the interface of language change, comparative reconstruction, linguistic theory, and psycholinguistics, and ultimately for our understanding of a core aspect of the human language faculty.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
1010 WIEN
Austria
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.