Formale Diachrone Semantik / Formal Diachronic Semantics

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:

FoDS conferences – past

The Formal Diachronic Semantics conference has been running since 2016:

FoDS conferences – future

We have planned next FoDS conferences as follows:

Scientific board:

1. 1. • 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)

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.