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Uneven language change

Objective

Different language levels – lexicon, phonology, morphology, and syntax – vary in rates of evolutionary change and in terms of their accessibility for being used as social indexes. Diachronic changes are thus uneven across the levels, and the discrepancy, once well understood, can be used to reconstruct linguistic and social events of the past. Using the Uralic family as a case study, we overcome the common practice of reducing linguistic histories to lexical histories and examine changes in forms across all language levels.
We pioneer a method of data collection and annotation that considers full phonological and morphological inventories, as well as a representative selection of lexical and syntactic ones. Coding of each form for cognacy is complemented by an account of its usage patterns as inferred from synchronic corpora. With the rich and multifaced data, we arrive at thousands of lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic changes for the language family. The unique dataset is further analysed to uncover patterns of diversification within Uralic in more details than ever before and to provide empirical answers to two fundamental questions: How does long-term linguistic evolution vary across the language levels, and What influences the variation across the levels?
Different types of language data often point to different topology of phylogenetic trees, and so subgrouping debates are known for many language families. By combining cutting-edge expertise in historical-comparative linguistics and in statistical modelling, we develop a model of language diversification that treats the variation across the types of evidence as a window into the very process of language change rather than a nuisance. Moreover, once the method is tested and articulated for reuse on other language families, it can assist detecting social rearrangements of the past, augmenting the current kit of research tools aimed at reconstruction of human prehistory.

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Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) ERC-2025-ADG

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Host institution

HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Net EU contribution
€ 2 499 976,00
Address
FABIANINKATU 33
00014 Helsinki
Finland
Region
Manner-Suomi Helsinki-Uusimaa Helsinki-Uusimaa
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost
No data

Beneficiaries (1)