The Diachrony of Written Language Contact A Contrastive Approach (Brill's Studies in Historical Linguistics, 15)

Nobody can deny that an account of grammatical change that takes written contact into consideration is a significant challenge for any theoretical perspective. Written contact of earlier periods or from a diachronic perspective mainly refers to contact through translation. The present book includes a diachronic dimension in the study of written language contact by examining aspects of the history of translation as related to grammatical changes in English and Greek in a contrastive way. In this respect, emphasis is placed on the analysis of diachronic retranslations: the book examines translations from earlier periods of English and Greek in relation to various grammatical characteristics of these languages in different periods and in comparison to non-translated texts.

Nikolaos Lavidas is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Language and Linguistics, Faculty of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His research interests lie in the areas of language change, historical linguistics, syntax-semantics interface, argument structure, (historical) language contact and historical corpora.