What is FoDS about?
FoDS stands for Fo[rmal] D[iachronic] S[emantics] and is to be understood as a scientific initiative bringing together scholars working on the semantics and pragmatics of diachronic changes in natural languages from a formal perspective. The first official FoDS conference was organized by Regine Eckardt in Konstanz (Germany).
A brief history of FoDS and related events
FoDS emerged out of several activities of the informal interest group in formal diachronic semantics. These activities include organizing a series of the following events:
Year | Location | Event | Organizers |
2019 | Yale University (USA) | Conference: ‘Meaning in Flux 2019: Connecting Development, Variation, and Change’ | Sarah Babinski / Randi Martinez / Joshua Phillips / Emanuel Souza de Quadros / Kate Stanton |
2017 | Yale University (USA) | Conference: ‘Meaning in Flux: Connecting Development, Variation, and Change’ | Martín Fuchs / María M. Piñango / Sara Sánches-Alonso / Jisu Sheen / Muye Zhang |
2015 | University of Naples (Italy) | Workshop: ‘Habituality and Genericity in Flux’ at the conference ’22nd International Conference on Historical Linguisics’ | Nora Boneh / Łukasz Jędrzejowski |
2015 | University of Naples (Italy) | Workshop: ‘Patterns and Models of Semantic Change’ at the conference ’22nd International Conference on Historical Linguisics’ | Cleo Condoravdi / Ashwini Deo |
2014 | University of Göttingen (Germany) | Workshop: ‘Formal Theories of Meaning Change’ at the conference ‘Sinn und Bedeutung 19’ | – |
2013 | University of Texas at Austin (USA) | Workshop: ‘Systematic Semantic Change’ | Ashwini Deo |
FoDS conferences – past
The Formal Diachronic Semantics conference has been running since 2016:
Year | Location | Date | Invited speakers | Programme |
2021 | University of Cologne (Germany) | 6th-7th September | Cleo Condoravdi, Hana Filip, Gunnar Lund, Stefan Hinterwimmer, | CfP / Flyer Programme |
2020 | Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) | 20th-21st January | Ashwini Deo, Regine Eckardt, Remus Gergel, Alexandra Simonenko | CfP / Programme |
2019 | Ohio State University (USA) | 15th-16th November | Cleo Condoravdi, Gerhard Jäger, Igor Yanovich | CfP / Programme |
2018 | University of Oslo (Norway) | 13th-14th September | Sigrid Beck, Heather Burnett | Programme |
2017 | Saarland University (Germany) | 20th-21st November | Ashwini Deo, Chiara Gianollo, Verena Hehl | Programme / Poster / Flyer |
2016 | University of Konstanz (Germany) | 12th-14th September | Dag Trygve Truslev Haug | Programme |
FoDS conferences – future
We have planned next FoDS conferences as follows:
Year | Location | Date | Invited speakers | Programme |
2022 | Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Hungary) | 10th–11th November | Nora Boneh, Remus Gergel, Regine Eckardt | Programme |
2023 | National Center for Scientific Research / Basque Texts and Language Study Center (IKER) (France / Basque Country) | Tba. | Tba. | Programme |
Scientific board:
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- Corien Bary (Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands)
- Sigrid Beck (University of Tübingen, Germany)
- Andrea Beltrama (University of Konstanz, Germany)
- Agnes Bende-Farkas (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary)
- Nora Boneh (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
- Heather Burnett (National Center for Scientific Research, Paris, France)
- Cleo Condoravdi (Stanford University, USA)
- Ashwini Deo (Ohio State University, USA)
- Regine Eckardt (University of Konstanz, Germany)
- Urtzi Etxeberria (CNRS–IKER, France / Basque Country)
- Hana Filip (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany)
- Kai von Fintel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA)
- Remus Gergel (Saarland University, Germany)
- Chiara Gianollo (University of Bologna, Italy)
- Patrick Georg Grosz (University of Oslo, Norway)
- Daniel Gutzmann (University of Cologne, Germany)
- Dag Trygve Truslew Haug (University of Oslo, Norway)
- Klaus von Heusinger (University of Cologne, Germany)
- Stefan Hinterwimmer (University of Wuppertal, Germany)
- Vera Hohaus (University of Manchsester, UK)
- Laurence R. Horn (Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA)
- Łukasz Jędrzejowski (University of Cologne, Germany)
- Manfred Krifka (Leibniz-ZAS, Berlin & HU Berlin, Germany)
- Clemens Mayr (University of Göttingen, Germany)
- Roumyana Pancheva (University of Southern California, USA)
- Uli Sauerland (Leibniz-ZAS, Berlin, Germany)
- Gerhard Schaden (Charles de Gaulle University – Lille III, France)
- Alexandra Simonenko (Ghent University, Belgium)
- Stephanie Solt (Leibniz-ZAS, Berlin, Germany)
- Robert Truswell (University of Edinburgh, Scotland)
- Carla Umbach (University of Cologne & Leinbniz-ZAS, Berlin, Germany)
- Igor Yanovich (University of Tübingen, Germany)
- Hedde Zeijlstra (University of Göttingen, Germany)
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FoDS literature
The main aim of this subsection is to provide a list of works dealing explicitly with the formal diachronic semantics and pragmatics. It is by no means exhaustive. Please feel free to contact me with your own suggestions!
B
- Beck, Sigrid / Polina Berezovskaya & Katja Pflugfelder (2009): The use of again in 19th-century English versus Present-day English, in: Syntax 12(3): 193-214.
- Beck, Sigrid & Remus Gergel (2015): The diachronic semantics of English again, in: Natural Language Semantics 23(3): 157-203.
- Bell, Melanie J. & Martin Schäfer (2016): Modelling semantic transparency, in: Morphology 26(2): 157-199.
C
- Condoravdi, Cleo & Ashwini Deo (2015): Aspect shifts in Indo-Aryan and trajectories of semantic change, in: Language Change at the Syntax Semantics Interface (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 278) ed. by Chiara Gianollo, Agnes Jäger & Doris Penka, 261-292. Berlin: de Gruyter.
D
- Deo, Ashwini (2014): Formal semantics/pragmatics and language change, in: The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics ed. by Claire Bowern & Bethwyn Evans, 393-409. Oxford: Routledge.
- Deo, Ashwini (2015a): The semantic and pragmatic underpinnings of grammaticalization paths: The progressive to imperfective shift, in: Semantics and Pragmatics 8(14): 1-52 [online publication].
- Deo, Ashwini (2015b): Diachronic semantics, in: Annual Review of Linguistics 1: 179-197.
E
- Eckardt, Regine (2006): Meaning Change in Grammaticalization: An Enquiry into Semantic Reanalysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Eckardt, Regine (2010): Grammaticalization and semantic reanalysis, in: Semantics. An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 33.3) ed. by Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner, 2675-2702. Berlin: de Gruyter.
- Enke, Dankmar / Roland Mühlenbernd & Igor Yanovich (2016): The emergence of the progressive to imperfective diachronic cycle in reinforcement-learning agents, in: The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11) ed. by Sean Roberts, Christine Cuskley, Luke McCrohon, Lluís Barceló-Coblijn, Olga Fehér & Tessa Verhoef [online publication].
F
- Fintel, Kai von (1995): The formal semantics of grammaticalization, in: Proceedings of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS) ed. by Jill N. Beckman, 175-190. Amherst, MA: GLSA.
G
- Gergel, Remus (2009): Rather. On a modal cycle, in: Cyclical Change [Linguistik Aktuell / Linguistics Today 146] ed. by Elly van Gelderen, 243-264. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Gergel, Remus (2015): Most historically, in: Language Change at the Syntax Semantics Interface (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 278) ed. by Chiara Gianollo, Agnes Jäger & Doris Penka, 101-123. Berlin: de Gruyter.
- Gergel, Remus (2016): Modality and gradation. Comparing the sequel of developments in rather and eher, in: Cyclical Change Continued (Linguistik Aktuell / Linguistics Today 227), 319-350. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Gergel, Remus (2017): Dimensions of variation in Old English modals, in: Modality across Syntactic Categories (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 63) ed. by Ana Arregui, María Luisa Rivero & Andrés Salanova, 179-207. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Gergel, Remus & Sigrid Beck (2014): Early Modern English again: A corpus study and semantic analysis, in: English Language & Linguistics 19(1): 27-47.
- Gergel, Remus / Andreas Blümel & Martin Kopf (2016): Another heavy road of decompositionality: Notes from a dying adverb, in: University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 22(1): 109–118 [online publication].
H
- Harmon, Zara & Vsevolod Kapatsinski (2017): Putting old tools to novel uses: The role of form accessibility in semantic extension, in: Cognitive Psychology 98(1): 22-44.
K
- Klaussner, Carmen & Carl Vogel (2018): Temporal predictive regression models for linguistic style analysis, in: Journal of Language Modelling 6(1): 175-122 [online publication].
R
- Rooij, Robert van (2004a): Evolution of conventional meaning and conversational principles, in: Synthese 139(2): 331-366.
- Rooij, Robert van (2004b): Signalling games select Horn strategies, in: Linguistics and Philosophy 27(4): 493-527.
S
- Schlechtweg, Dominik / Stefanie Eckmann / Enrico Santus / Sabine Schulte im Walde & Daniel Hole (2017): German in flux: Detecting metaphoric change via word entropy, in: CoNLL: The SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning 2017 [online publication].
- Schwarze, Christoph (2009): On the development of Latin –sk– to French and Italian – Lexicalization, reanalysis and spreading, in: Rivista di Linguistica 21(2): 343-382.
T
- Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Jennifer Smith (2021): Obviously undergoing change: Adverbs of evidentiality across time and space. Language Variation and Change 33(1): 81-105, DOI.
W
- Winterstein, Grégoire / Regine Lai / Daniel Tsz-hin Lee & Zoe Pei-sui Luk (2018): From additivity to mirativity: The Cantonese sentence final particle tim1, in: Glossa. A Journal of General Linguistics 3(1): 88. 1-38. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.446.
Y
- Yanovich, Igor (2013a): Four Pieces for Modality, Context and Usage. PhD thesis, MIT.
- Yanovich, Igor (2013b): Invariantist might and modal meaning change. A reply to Braun (2012), in: Linguistics and Philosophy 36(2): 175-180.
- Yanovich, Igor (2016a): Genetic drift explains Sapir’s “drift” in semantic change, in: The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11) ed. by Sean Roberts, Christine Cuskley, Luke McCrohon, Lluís Barceló-Coblijn, Olga Fehér & Tessa Verhoef [online publication].
- Yanovich, Igor (2017b): Old English *motan, variable-force modality, and the presupposition of inevitable actualization, in: Language 92(3): 489-521.
- Yanovich, Igor (2017): May under verbs of hoping: Evolution of the modal system in the complements of hoping verbs in Early Modern English, in: Modality across Syntactic Categories ed. by Ana Arregui, María Luisa Rivero & Andrés Salanova, 132-153. Oxford: Oxford University Press.