Pragmatic Resources in Old Indo-European Languages - research stay for Olga Thomason

PROIEL will be a close linguistic study of the language of the Greek text of the New Testament as well as its translations into the old Indo-European languages Latin, Gothic, Armenian and Church Slavonic. In its first stage, 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. In producing oral or written discourses, speakers/writers mark discourse referents (eve nts, 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. The grammar, and in particular the syntax, offers different resources that can be used for this purpose. In May/June 2008 the project was visited by the world leading expert on the comparative syntax the early Indo-European Bible translations, Professor Jared Klein. We want to develop our contacts with his research group at the Universit y of Georgia by inviting other members to Oslo.