Acknowledgements
This book is an original research monograph. It belongs to the broad area of my research work, which includes my PhD thesis on argument structure in diachrony, my postdoctoral research on the diachrony of word order from a language change—language acquisition perspective, and a series of articles and organized workshops on contrastive Greek-English diachronic analyses and Indo-European linguistics, from the perspective of language change and bilingualism.
Nobody can deny that an account of grammatical change that takes written contact into consideration is a significant challenge for any theoretical perspective. The main contribution of the present book is to add a diachronic dimension to the study of written contact by examining aspects of the history of translation as they relate to grammatical changes in English and Greek in a contrastive way. In this respect, emphasis is placed on the analysis of diachronic retranslations. I examine translations from earlier periods of English and Greek in relation to various grammatical characteristics of these languages in different periods and in comparison to non-translated texts. Moreover, I add a second parameter of examination: translations can be seen as a source of evidence of grammatical change; a new grammar demands a new translation. The book has two clear-cut sections: (i) a theoretical one that discusses the history of translations in relation to grammatical changes in Greek and English, as well as the theoretical framework of the study of the relation between translations and diachrony; and (ii) a more research-based section that presents the results of corpus-based studies in the history of translations in English and Greek. Most of the data in the second part are related to characteristics of voice and argument structure.
First, I would like to thank Jóhanna Barðdal for her enormous help, support, essential guidance, and endless discussions of several parts of the book. I would also like to thank Elisa Perotti for her great help, patience, trust in me, and excellent collaboration. Brill was on my side from the first moment until all preparations for the book were completed. In addition, I wholeheartedly thank the two anonymous reviewers for successful suggestions and fruitful criticism. Needless to say, all errors remain mine.
I owe a sincere thank you to all the people who have supported me since the start of this project. The idea of the project started when I was member of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of English, School of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Most of its parts were completed when I was member of the Department of Language and Linguistics, Faculty of English, School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. I learned much about the way one should work with diachronic and developmental data and about modern methodologies of linguistic research, and I owe much to all linguists of the Schools of Philosophy of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
In 2015 Elly van Gelderen (Arizona State University) and Alexander Bergs (University of Osnabrück) invited me to create the first version of the Naxos Summer School of Old and Middle English, which later became the Naxos Summer School on Diachronic Linguistics. Ioanna Sitaridou (University of Cambridge) joined our common efforts, and we managed to broaden the scope of the summer school. I owe Elly, Alex, and Ioanna much of my enthusiasm and energy. They felt my anxieties, they discussed with me several ideas for research projects, and they were always present, to strengthen academic initiatives and to start new “risky” ones.
Leonid Kulikov (University of Ghent), Donka Minkova (UCLA), Olga Fischer (University of Amsterdam), Dag Haug (University of Oslo), Þórhallur Eyþórsson (University of Iceland), Igor Yanovich (University of Tübingen, University of Vienna), Antonio Revuelta Puigdollers (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), and Artemij Keidan (Sapienza Università di Roma) were always great friends, “teachers,” and collaborators, supporting me during the long period of preparing this book. I do not have words to thank them; the project owes them much, too. My gratitude also goes to a wonderful team of researchers, PhD candidates under my supervision, Theodora Panagiotidou (she completed her PhD Dissertation in March 2021), Thomi Gamagari and Vassilis Symeonidis.
My last thank you goes to all Teachers I have met and to all my Students who will believe in themselves.