Research
NEWS: Thanks to a Stipendium Academiae Belgicae, I was in beautiful Rome this spring for a research stay at the Academia Belgica! Last year, thanks to a grant for stay abroad from the Research Foundation Flanders, I have been a Visiting Academic at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics of the University of Oxford!
📚 Research Interests: general 📚
I am interested in the application of modern linguistic approaches to historical languages (especially Ancient Greek and other Indo-European languages) in order to investigate how the linguistic variation of certain morphosyntactic features in their contexts of usage can be meaningful (semantically, socially, and on the communicative level broadly intended).
Although I often ask myself "when" and "how" something happened, I particularly enjoy to begin my linguistic journeys with "why?".
📚 Research Interests: particular 📚
In my PhD project at Ghent University under the main supervision of Prof. Klaas Bentein, I investigate the linguistic and sociolinguistic variation of Post-Classical Greek relative clauses. My goal is to provide not only a corpus-based analysis of relative clauses between the first and the eight century AD, but also an interpretation of the data: to critically explore the relationship between the linguistic and the social dimension, I propose to apply the notion of linguistic complexity. Lately, I have been investigating the definite article as a relative marker in non-literary sources, the application of the Accessibility Hierarchy to Post-Classical Greek, the use of continuative clauses in petitions and the phenomenon of relative attraction.
As an affiliated member of the ERC project EVWRIT (Everyday Writing in Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt), my research aims to contribute to a new digital and socio-semiotic investigation of papyri. Since I discovered the world of documentary papyrology in the past few years, I have been collaborating to the EVWRIT database and I am currently co-editing some unpublished papyrus fragments from Egypt.
Being especially fond of historical sociolinguistics approaches to linguistic phenomena, I am a member of the Historical Sociolinguistics Network. I am also interested in the syntactic variation of subordinate clauses in their context, a topic which has been explored in a conference I co-organised on Subordination and Insubordination in Post-Classical Greek.
I have previously worked for my master's thesis in Pisa on non-nominative subject constructions in Ancient Greek: I deepened my interest in non-canonical argument marking in historical languages while taking part in the ERC project EVALISA (The Evolution of Case, Alignment and Argument Structure in Indo-European).
📢 Talks (hopefully more to come!) 📢
(20/03/2024) "Aristophanes and political satire" (with Chiara Monaco) - Festival Européen Latin Grec: Bloemlezing van Aristophanes’ Vrouwenparlement in Gent (BE)
(13/01/2024) "'Hij die het niet verdient mijn man te worden genoemd': het gebruik van relatiefzinnen in Griekse papyrusbrieven en petities" - 54e Papyrologendag in Leiden (NL);
(08/09/2023) "Continuative relative clauses in Greek documentary papyri" - ICHL 26 (International Conference on Historical Linguistics) in Heidelberg (DE);
(31/08/2023) "The Accessibility Hierarchy in Greek documentary papyri: from syntax to sociolinguistics" - 56th Annual Meeting SLE (Societas Linguistica Europaea) in Athens (GR);
(24/06/2023) "'What I had sent you through the camel-driver': aspects of relativisation in Greek papyrus letters" - Graduate Philology Day in Cambridge (UK);
(13/06/2023) "Framing the bad guys: strategies of relativization in the depiction of the wrongdoer in papyrus petitions" - Everyday Communication in Antiquity: Frames and Framings in Ghent (BE);
(27/07/2022) PechaKucha presentation on PhD research - HiSoN (Historical Sociolinguistics Network) Summer School 2022 in Lesbos (GR);
(18/06/2022) "The definite article as a relative marker in Greek documentary texts" -2021 ICAGL (International Colloquium of Ancient Greek Linguistics) in Madrid (ES);
(14/05/2022) "Detecting complexity in relative clauses: applications and potential in Post-Classical Greek" - Subordination and Insubordination in Post-Classical Greek: Syntax, Context and Complexity in Ghent (BE);
(04/03/2022) "Syntactic variation and everyday rhetoric in Greek papyrus petition" - OIKOS Biannual Conference on Linguistics and Rhetoric in Katwijk (NL);
(03/02/2022) "In search of glimpses: the contribution of papyri to the diachrony of relative articles" - New Light from the East: Linguistic Perspectives on Non-Literary Papyri and Related Sources;
(23/04/2021) "Between linguistic variation and social meaning: the complexity of Greek relative clauses in documentary papyri" - U4/ENLIGHT Winter School in Antiquity;
(09/01/2021) "The interplay of linguistic and social factors in the choice of the relative marker: some evidence from Greek documentary papyri (I-VIII AD)" - Third Annual Meeting NARNiHS (North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics);
(19/06/2019) "Politeness theory and historical politeness" - Fifth session EVWRIT Reading Group in Ghent (BE);
(11/09/2018) "Oblique Subjects in Latin and Ancient Greek" - Workshop Aspect and Alignment in Indo-European and Proto-Indo-European in Ghent (BE);
(29/08/2018) "Oblique Subjects in Latin and Ancient Greek" (co-author) - 51st Annual Meeting SLE (Societas Linguistica Europaea) in Tallinn (EE).
📝 Publications (hopefully more to come!) 📝
E. Cattafi. (forthcoming). Framing the bad guys. Continuative clauses in the depiction of the wrongdoer in papyrus petitions. Lexis: Poetica, retorica e comunicazione nella tradizione classica, Special Issue on Everyday communication in Antiquity: frames and framings.
E. Cattafi. (forthcoming). The Accessibility Hierarchy in Post-Classical Greek between syntax and sociolinguistics. In Bentein, K., E. Cattafi & E. La Roi (eds.). Subordination and Insubordination in Post-Classical Greek: from syntax to context. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Bentein, K., E. Cattafi & E. La Roi (eds.). (forthcoming). Subordination and Insubordination in Post-Classical Greek: from syntax to context. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Bentein, K. & E. Cattafi. 2024 (preprint available). Relative clauses. In G. Giannakis, P. Filos, M. Janse, B. Joseph & I. Manolessou (eds.). Encyclopedia of Greek language and linguistics. Leiden: Brill.
Bentein, K. & E. Cattafi. 2024 (entry available online). Complexity . In G. Giannakis, P. Filos, M. Janse, B. Joseph & I. Manolessou (eds.). Encyclopedia of Greek language and linguistics. Leiden: Brill.
E. Cattafi. 2023. Relative articles in Greek documentary texts. Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 101: 33-68.
Barðdal, J., E. Cattafi et al. 2023 (available in Open Access). Non-Nominative Subjects in Latin and Ancient Greek: Applying the Subject Tests on Early Indo-European Material. Indogermanische Forschungen 128 (1): 321–392.