Xavier Bach: The Origins of Inflectional Classes

The Department of Romance Studies at CU FA cordially invites you to a lecture by Xavier Bach that will be held on 26 April at the main building of CU FA, room 116 at 3 pm.

In this lecture, Xavier Bach will examine the diachronic development of inflectional classes in a wide range of language families, showing that they can originate in a series of phenomena including sound change, grammaticalisation, reanalysis, heteroclisis, and existing systems of nominal classification (gender and alienability distinctions), and that each possible source gives rise to a different type of inflectional class system.

Xavier Bach is Junior Research Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Oxford. He first studied French and Medieval History for a Licence and an M.A. at the University of Toulouse. He then went to work in education and in cultural charities fighting for the preservation and development of the regional language Occitan. In 2011, he came to Oxford for an MSt in Linguistics, and subsequently for a PhD completed in 2019. His main research is in morphological typology with a focus on non-canonical phenomena in inflection, their diachronic origins, and their prevalence and forms in the languages of the world, in particular in Romance and South Halmahera-West New Guinea languages. His recent projects include an investigation of the development of post-verbal negative markers in Occitan (joint work with Sandra Paoli, Oxford), mixed auxiliation systems in Italo-Romance (with Pavel Štichauer, Prague), the linguistics of semantic categories such as colour terms (with Benjamin Fagard, Paris), and the historical sociolinguistics of the south of France (with Pierre-Joan Bernard, Montpellier).

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The event is held as part of the KREAS project (M.1.5).