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The ERC Consolidator grant for the project EVOCAT (The Evolution of Morphosyntactic Categorization), led by Laura Grestenberger, addresses a fundamental question of linguistics and the cognitive sciences more broadly: How do grammatical categories such as 鈥渧erb鈥� or 鈥渘oun鈥� arise and how do they change over centuries and millennia?

Linguistic categories are cognitive tools that help us structure the world around us and communicate with one another. Central to this are so-called categorizers 鈥� small building blocks of human language, such as suffixes that mark the category of a word. For example, English -y in mess-y signals that the word is an adjective. EVOCAT investigates how these categorizers develop over the course of language history in order to uncover the general principles that govern this development.

The project focuses particularly on ancient Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin, as well as their modern descendants. Using large digital text corpora, the EVOCAT team will build a comprehensive database of morphological structures that mark grammatical categories. The goal is to identify systematic, and possibly universal, patterns in the historical changes of these structures 鈥� with important implications for theories of language change, language reconstruction, and human cognition.

The project鈥檚 central hypothesis is that the historical development of categorizers is generally directional 鈥� for instance, from noun markers to verb markers 鈥� which could open up new possibilities for reconstructing language family trees. To test the general validity of its hypotheses, EVOCAT also compares these processes with similar phenomena in non-Indo-European languages.
EVOCAT combines cutting-edge linguistic theory with traditional as well as digital philological methods, opening up new avenues for understanding how language is represented in the brain and transmitted from generation to generation. Its findings promise to provide far-reaching insights not only for linguistics but also for adjacent fields such as cognitive sciences psychology, and philosophy.