Presentation

In December 2020, a group of scholars in verbal semantics of different modern and ancient languages met to share information about research methods and techniques. We recorded the results in videos on the Red Iberoamericana de Investigadores en Próximo Oriente Antiguo (RIIPOA) website, available here: https://www.riipoa.com/Taller-Sem%C3%A1ntica-verbal/

We plan to publish a collective volume: Modern and ancient languages: Differences and similarities in studying verbal semantics

This collective volume’s general idea is to showcase differences and common points when approaching verbal semantics (valency and Aktionsart) depending on whether the studied language is modern or ancient. The aim is to learn from the practice of colleagues that specialise in languages with very particular study features, independently from the theoretical approach adopted. In doing so, we expect that the reflections will concentrate on methodological, technical and practical issues, intimately related to the material under study, including but not restricted to:

• corpus analysis (variability, text mining)
• support – text – writing system – language interaction
• informants’ reliability
• philology – linguistics interaction
• literacy – orality interaction

These questions raise reflections on the theoretical level about language and linguistics, which can be of deep and long interest such as the separation between graphemics and linguistics, or the traditionally predominant role of orality in linguistics. Independent of the particular contributors’ research on the language(s) they work on, this volume intends to deepen the methodological perspective: the intellectual and material resources, procedures and techniques involved in collecting verbal semantics information.
This approach may significantly enrich our discussion on the several problems we face in studying languages whether for being modern or ancients, accessing the sources of information or the cultural distance, being this spatial or temporal.

Call for papers

We will submit the volume for acceptance to the series Estudios Orientales – Monografías RIIPOA, to be open-access published on www.riipoa.com, presumably by the end of 2021. The series Estudios Orientales – Monografías RIIPOA assures its scientific quality at the highest standards through a prestigious external reading board and double-blind peer-reviewing of the manuscripts.

The table of contents of the volume is so far:

• Maria Agustina Morando (Universidad Católica Argentina): Alcances y posibilidades del método etnográfico: reflexiones a partir del guaraní chaqueño
• Márcia Cançado y Luana Amaral (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais): Verboweb: Syntactic-semantic classification of Brazilian Portuguese verbs
• José Virgilio García Trabazo (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela): Categorías gramaticales y semántica verbal en hitita y otras lenguas anatolias
• Carlos Gracia Zamacona (Universidad de Alcalá): Algunas reflexiones sobre cómo estudiar una lengua antigua: el caso de la semántica verbal del antiguo egipcio

To broaden the languages under study and the methodological and theoretical approaches, we will accept contributions on the topics and research lines mentioned above. Contributions on languages not covered in the temporary table of contents will be especially appreciated. We welcome papers in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Italian and German.

If interested, please send an abstract up to 300 words (bibliography excluded) by the 10th of March 2021 to the volume’s editor, Carlos Gracia Zamacona (carlos.gracia@uah.es). The selection result of abstracts will be announced on the 31st of March 2021.

The selected authors will be invited to submit the contributions by the 31st of July 2021.

Any question, please write to the volume’s editor.