Historical and Typological Linguistics

Research in this broad area addresses the nature of variation in human languages, either as variation emerges from diachronic change or from the array of naturally possible linguistics structures. At Oregon, research in historical linguistics and typology covers a very broad array of topics: language reconstruction, historical syntax, comparative studies, historical corpora, and typological surveys.

Dobreysho Gospel project (Vakareliyska)

This project is an annotated corrected second annotated edition and study of the Macedonian/western Bulgarian Dobreysho Gospel manuscript, from the 12th or 13th century. The Dobreysho Gospel, which is written in Church Slavonic, is the oldest member of the only family of closely-related Bulgarian gospel manuscripts that has been identified.The first edition of the manuscript, published in 1906 in Bulgaria by Benyo Tsonev, is seriously flawed, with many typographical errors and incomplete or entirely missing reproductions of the liturgical instructions to the manuscript's text. The corrected edition is based on first-hand comparison of Tsonev's edition with the original manuscript in Sofia, Bulgaria. The edition will include an analysis of the manuscript's distinguishing orthographic, phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic features, focusing on these as evidence of the underlying vernacular Middle Bulgarian dialects of the various scribes and editors who contributed to the manuscript's prehistory, and identifying the linguistic and textual features that distinguish the Dobreysho Gospel from its two close relatives, the 14th-century Curzon Gospel and the 13th- or 14th-century Banitsa Gospel. A chapter on the paleographic features of the manuscript is being written for the project by Dr. Elena Musakova of Sofia, Bulgaria.

Multiple Language and Cultural Self-Identities Project. (Vakareliyska)

This historical sociolinguistic project, a monograph in progress, investigates issues of self-identification with multiple languages and cultures by members of language minority communities in societies with two or more dominant languages. The project is a case study of the Russian Germans, i.e., Russian citizens of German descent, in two adjacent provinces of the so-called 'Russian Poland' portion of the Imperial Russian Empire during the 19th and early 20th century. These provinces are now Mazowsze, in Poland, and Suvalkija, in Lithuania. The project, based on first-hand examination of documents in the Polish and Lithuanian National Archives, focuses on code-switching by Russian Germans between Polish and Russian, the two dominant languages, in written documents, their naming and signature practices, particularly the use of multiple names and signatures, in German, Polish, and Russian, by individuals, and self-perceptions of cultural identity and political loyalty, particularly during World War I, when Russian Poland was occupied by the German Army. The Russian Germans' self-perceptions primarily as Russian subjects are contrasted in the study to perceptions of the Russian Germans by the Imperial Russian government as internal enemies sympathetic to the Kaiser.

On-line Medieval Slavic Calendar Collation (Vakareliyska)

This humanities computing project consists of the development of an on-line computer collation of medieval Slavic menologies (calendars of saints), which will consist eventually of a corpus of over 400 mostly unpublished texts. The project arose from the need to find an efficient way to create a typology of medieval Slavic calendars traditions, since the contents of medieval Eastern Orthodox menologies, most of which are unpublished manuscripts, vary widely according to century, country, and local tradition. The project will allow researchers worldwide to search the corpus on-line by specific lexeme, by century or date, by country of origin, by calendar date, and by saint's name, in order to compare the features of any one calendar against the entire collection of calendars. The data that makes up the corpus has been collected from archives in Bulgaria, Russia, and England, and from published 19th- and early 20th-century sources. Undergraduate and graduate students who have taken a term of Old Church Slavonic have contributed to the data entry and electronic for this project for course credit, in the Slavic Calendars humanities computing practicum. The search program for the collation is being designed by Prof. David J. Birnbaum, at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh.

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