Fellowship focus: Using cutting-edge computational methods to analyse how Latin diversified into romance languages in just 2000 years.
This Fellowship will bring together Dr Pellegrini’s knowledge of open language data with Surrey’s modelling expertise to understand the paradigms of language: why, for example, there are four different forms of a verb in one language but over a hundred in another. Using computational simulations, Dr Pellegrini and Professor Round will drill deep into the constraints on paradigm evolution and identify the historical ‘chess moves’ by which Latin transformed into its modern descendants such as French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian.