Indefinites between Latin and Romance

Chiara Gianollo is Senior Assistant Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Bologna. She obtained her MA and PhD from the University of Pisa and has held appointments as lecturer and researcher at the Universities of Trieste, Konstanz, Stuttgart, and Cologne. Her main research areas are diachronic syntax and semantics, with specific focus on the use of formal theoretical linguistics to investigate the history of Greek, Latin, and Old Romance. She is the co-editor, with Agnes Jäger and Doris Penka, of Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface (de Gruyter 2015).

Gianollo's Indefinites between Latin and Romance is a perfect example of how theoretical hypotheses raise empirical questions whose answers, when pursued with rigorous methods, can ground more general and solid theoretical analyses. It is also an excellent case of how a multidisciplinary approach that brings together syntax, semantics and pragmatics on the theoretical side and corpus research, philology and the history of language on the empirical side can make breakthrough advances in our understanding of language.

• 1: The grammar of indefinites: Functions, variation, and change 2: Specific and epistemic indefinites in Latin 3: Aliquis from Latin to Romance 4: Indefinites and negation in the history of Latin 5: Developments in negative and polarity-sensitive contexts from Latin to Romance 6: Conclusions