Stefan Dedio

“The dog steals our dinner from the kitchen counter” is a perfectly normal, albeit slightly unfortunate English sentence. Stealing is going on, someone is doing the stealing, something is being stolen, and there is a place it is being stolen from. We can deduce who is doing what to whom, i.e. the semantic roles present in the sentence, from the position of the elements (the stealer is positioned in front of the verb), from the form of the verb (it has the same number as the stealer), and from additions to the elements (“from” is added to the place from which something is stolen). The languages of the world differ widely in how they use those three means, and as with anything in language, there is constant change.

Stefan Dedio's project studies these changes in the languages spoken in Britain and Ireland from late Antiquity to the present day, trying to find out how and where changes originate, how they propagate throughout the language, which social circumstances facilitate change, and how neighbouring languages can influence each other. On the basis of these results and studies conducted on languages in other parts of the world, Dedio tries to develop a framework to discuss and model changes in semantic role expression.