PROIEL: Pragmatic Resources in Old Indo-European Languages
This project is a close linguistic study of the language in the Greek text of the New Testament as well as its translations into the old Indo-European languages Latin, Gothic, Armenian and Old Church Slavonic.
About the project
The project aims at describing and accounting for the so-called pragmatic resources of these languages, i.e. the resources that the grammar makes available for structuring information in a text, and eventually to compare the different systems from a typological and a genetic perspective.
In producing oral or written discourses, speakers/writers mark discourse referents (events, times, places and individuals that are spoken about) as old, new or contrastive information in order to make it easier for listeners/readers to keep track of them. Different languages provide different means to achieve this.
Objectives
In PROIEL we focus particularly on:
- Word order
- Discourse particles
- Pronominal reference and the use of null pronouns
- Expressions of definiteness
- The use of participles to refer to background events
Resources
In order to facilitate a full comparative study of these phenomena, we are creating a parallel corpus of the old Indo-European translations of the New Testament.
Funding
Pragmatic Resources in Old Indo-European Languages (PROIEL) is financed by the Norwegian Research Council under their YFF programme (2008 - 2012). You can read the project description here.