Professor of Classics, Joshua Katz has received a prestigious “Chaire Internationale 2018” from the Laboratoire d’excellence “Fondaments Empiriques de la Linguistique” (EFL) in Paris and will be giving a series of four seminars in January-February 2018 on the subject “Marginal Linguistic Phenomena.”
In the series Katz considers a number of marginal linguistic phenomena in languages from Ancient Greek to Modern French, paying attention to both synchronic and diachronic analysis and in particular to the combination of pleasures and pitfalls that historical reconstruction presents. He shows that looking at the periphery, and doing so with an eye on philology and sociocultural circumstance as well as on the purely linguistic, can be a fruitful way to answer the two very different core questions “What is language?” and “What is a language?”
The EFL is based on the collaborative work of a consortium of teams of theoretical and applied linguistics. Its goal: to open new perspectives on linguistic research.
