The study of diachronic semantics, taking in both semantic reconstruction and semantic change, has long been one of the less systematic enterprises in historical linguistics. While some advances have been made in the area of shifts in grammatical meaning, diachronic lexical semantics is perhaps less well understood. Metaphor appears to be a powerful force in semantic change, and both the linguistic context and the pragmatic/social milieu (Christiansen and Joseph 2016) can play a key role as well. These observations have meant that some seemingly unusual changes have to be recognized that would be inexplicable without an understanding of the cultural milieu in which the change takes place; the shift of earlier English bede (later bead) from ‘prayer’ to ‘small round perforated ball’ is a classic case of this sort. Nonetheless, a confounding aspect in the study of semantic change is the fact that proper attention to the cultural and pragmatic milieu can also reveal instances of semantic persistence, sometimes over long stretches of time. In this presentation, I discuss a number of examples of such persistence in Albanian; in particular, details of usage for various present-day Albanian words and phrases reveal aspects of what can plausibly be reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European cultural semantics, echoed in continuations of the language more than six millennia later. 

Brian has been at OSU since 1979, after receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1978 and spending a year as a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta. His interests are quite broad, but are focused first and foremost on the study of language change, especially in regard to the Greek language throughout all of its historical phases, from Mycenaean up through Modern Greek, including its prehistory and how it fits into the Indo-European language family and also its more recent significant contact with its neighboring languages in the Balkans. But Brian’s interests run also to other languages, especially Sanskrit and Albanian, and to other areas within linguistics, including both morphological theory and the embedding of language into social structures. More recently, he has been working on issues of language sustainability, looking both at what has gone into making the Greek language relatively robust in its diasporic setting in southern Albania and at what we can determine about linguistic -- and concomitantly ethnic -- viability in ancient times in the eastern Mediterranean.

Sponsored by: The Linguistic Research Center