Jana E. Beck

Research

My primary research interest is syntactic change across the history of Greek, from Homeric Greek through Modern Greek, but with a focus on change from Homeric Greek through the Greek of the New Testament. My interest in syntactic change over the history of Greek stems from a broader interest in language variation and change, including quantitative modeling of language variation and change and the consideration of the implications of patterns of language variation and change for broader theoretical questions in linguistics.

My other interests include the historical semantics of Greek and theoretical morphology, with a particular focus on Greek and Hungarian verbal morphologies and the theory of Distributed Morphology.

My advisor is Tony Kroch.

Conference Handouts

• Handout from November 20, 2011 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science presentation "Adapting Penn Treebank-style Annotation for Ancient Greek."
• Handout from January 7, 2011 LSA Annual Meeting 2011 talk "Two Changes in Greek Infinitival Syntax."
• Slides from January 7, 2011 LSA Annual Meeting 2011 talk co-authored with Constantine Lignos "The Power of Objects in Morphology Learning."
• Handout from December 16, 2010 talk at Ancient Greek and Semantic Theory (Nijmegen, Netherlands) "Realizations of Intensionality in Ancient Greek: The Differing Cases of ἄν and μή."
• Handout from October 23, 2010 NELS 41 talk "The Hungarian Verb and Constraints on Grammatically-Conditioned Allomorphy."

Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical Greek (PPCHiG)

I am currently in the process of constructing syntactically annotated corpora of various stages of the Greek language, modeled after the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English and utilizing text files from the Perseus Digital Library, which are licensed under a Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0 license. These corpora will be publically available (eventually) and searchable using CorpusSearch.

More information about the corpora is available at this page.