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Cycles of Grammaticalization

Aston University and Birmingham City University are delighted to announce the following series of one-day seminars on Cycles of Grammaticalization, funded under the International Network programme by The Leverhulme Trust. The seminars will seek to elucidate and diagnose the complex factors that lead to grammatical change through time, with particular reference to the negation cycle in English, French and German.                                                                                                               

The Anglo-Norman Year Books Corpus

Narrations et Dialogues en français ancien:  The Anglo-Norman Year Books Corpus

We are delighted to announce the availability of the corpus “Narrations et Dialogues en français ancien:  The Anglo-Norman Year Books Corpus”.

It presents 15 digitized volumes of Year Books from the end of the 13th to the 14th century. Totaling nearly 1.5 million words, they represent court hearings in words that the student writer would have spoken had they been responsible for pleading the cases presented.

Evidencing a variety of French aligned to the continental one, they are a unique resource in offering narrative and dialogue passages that stand as interactive communication in medieval time. This allows answers to be found to questions of historical syntax, pragmatics and sociolinguistics.

Resulting form the Leverhulme funded Research Network Cycles of Grammaticalization, the ANYBC could be assembled thanks to the support of the Rolls Society, the Ames Foundation, the Seldom Society and the British Museum. It is available free of charge for research purposes, on request from Pierre Larrivée.

Programme

The following seminars will be held at Aston University:

June 7, 2008: Ian Roberts (Cambridge), Sentence Structure of the Negative Cycle in French. Discussants: Pierre Larrivée (Aston) and Richard Ingham (BCU).

August 2, 2008: France Martineau (Ottawa), Phrase Structure of the Negative Cycle in French. Discussant: Lene Schøsler (Copenhagen).

December 6, 2008: Viviane Déprez (Institut des Sciences Cognitives and Rutgers), N-word features in the Negative Cycle in French. Discussant: Maj-Britt Mosegaard-Hansen (Manchester).

The following seminars will be held at Birmingham City University (BCU):

April 4, 2009: Ans van Kemenade (Nijmegen), Sentence Structure of the Negative Cycle in English. Discussant: Paul Rowlett (Salford).

July 25, 2009: Agnes Jäger (Frankfurt), Phrase Structure of the Negative Cycle in German. Discussant: Eric Haeberli (Geneva).

December 5, 2009: David Willis (Cambridge), Negative polarity and the quantifier cycle: Comparative diachronic perspectives from European languages. Discussant: Richard Ingham (BCU). Download the paper. 

                                                                                                                                                               

Dr Richard Ingham (for 2009 seminars)                                                                                                                                   School of English                                                                                                                                                                       Birmingham City University                                                                                                                                                  Perry Barr                                                                                                                          Birmingham                                                                                                                                                                          B42 2SU                                                                                                                                                                                  Tel. +44 (0)121 331 7664                                                                                                                                                            richard.ingham@bcu.ac.uk