Programme

PIETRO UMBERTO DINI (University of Pisa)
Pietro U. Dini is Full Professor of Baltic Philology, Lithuanian language and culture, General Linguistics, Translation studies, at the University of Pisa. He is foreign correspondent of the Academy of Science of Latvia (2004), Lithuania (2007), and Göttingen (2010); Forschungs-preisträger of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (2002), and dr. h.c. of Vilnius University (2005). Editor in chief of Res Balticae (13 vols, 1995-2013; cf. www.resbalticae.it) and Studia Baltica Pisana (8 vols, 2010-; cf. https://www.edizionijoker.com/collana-studia-baltica-pisana/). His main scientific interests include the historical linguistics, the relationships between Baltic and other Indo-European languages, the history and linguistic historiography of Baltic languages, the philology and linguistics of Old Prussian, Lithuanian and Latvian.

Main publications:
Foundations of Baltic languages, Vilnius, 2014 (free downloud); Ins undevd∫che gebracht. Sprachgebrauch und Übersetzungsverfahren im altpreußischen Kleinen Kathechismus, Berlin, 2014; Aliletoescvr. Prie baltų kalbotyros ištakų: teorijos ir jų kalbinė aplinka XVI amžiuje, Vilnius, 2023; Foundations of Old Prussian.Linguistic and Philology, Lexington, 2023

ANDRES KARJUS (Tallinn University)
Andres Karjus is a lecturer in artificial intelligence and digital humanities at Tallinn University, and senior research fellow at the Estonian Business School. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in AI from KU Leuven. His research focuses on variation and change in language and culture, approached using computational methods and corpus analysis, but also experimental approaches. His recent work has examined whether sociopolitical polarization shapes language use, how large language models can be used to augment and automate analytical tasks in humanities and social sciences and how domain-specific expertise can differentiate professional and laypeople AI users.  He is also involved in applied projects developing AI-based tools for education and writing assessment.
 
Recent publications:
Karjus, Andres (2025). Machine-assisted quantitizing designs: augmenting humanities and social sciences with artificial intelligence. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, 277.
Karjus, Andres; Cuskley, Christine (2024). Evolving linguistic divergence on polarizing social media. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11 (1).
Mets, Mark; Karjus, Andres; Ibrus, Indrek; Schich, Maximilian (2024). Automated stance detection in complex topics and small languages: The challenging case of immigration in polarizing news media. PLoS ONE, 19 (4), e0302380.

TORSTEN LEUSCHNER (Ghent University)
Torsten Leuschner is a specialist of Germanic who mostly works in (cognitive-)functional language typology and usage-based construction grammar, applying quantitatively informed qualitative methods, often in a contrastive perspective. He has published on grammaticalization, especially of complex sentences from discourse patterns in the conditional/concessive domain, on aspects of word-formation, and on German loanwords in neighbouring languages, focusing on the usage patterns of historical Germanisms and their role in the transmission of historical memory. He has also worked on language policies affecting German in multilingual settings, especially in the Belgian context, and on the sociolinguistic status of Belgian German. A native of Berlin, he has been Professor of German Linguistics at Ghent University since 2011. He is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Germanistische Mitteilungen (Heidelberg: Winter) and of the book series Linguistik: Empire und Theorie/Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics (Springer). He currently holds a Visiting Readership at Queen Mary University of London and serves as President of the Belgian Association of Teachers and Lecturers of German (BGDV).
 
Main publications:
Leuschner, Torsten (2006): Hypotaxis as Building-Site: the Emergence and Grammaticalization of Concessive Conditionals in English, German and Dutch. Munich: Lincom.
Leuschner, Torsten (2025): "Grammaticalization in Germanic". Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Germanic Linguistics (online).

NICOLE NAU (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań)
Nicole Nau is professor of general linguistics at the Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her research focuses on Latvian and Latgalian, and her research topics include grammar in spoken and written texts, corpus linguistics, lexicography, language documentation, diversity within and across languages, literacy, language change and language contact. She participated in the development of the first Latgalian speech corpus (https://mularkorpuss.rta.lv/#!/) and is currently part of the team creating a lexical database and online dictionary of Latgalian (see prototype at https://ltg.tezaurs.lv/). In the past, she collaborated in national and international projects concerning the grammar of Baltic languages, documentation and revitalization of lesser used languages and other topics. In 2016, she initiated, and has since coordinated, the MA program “Empirical Linguistics and Language Documentation” (http://elldo.amu.edu.pl/).

Important recent publications
Nau, Nicole. 2024. Seven Hundred Latgalian Words. A Dictionary Based on Stefania Ulanowska’s Collection of Fairytales from 1895. With Morphological and Lexicological Analyses by Nicole Nau. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Rys. https://doi.org/10.48226/978-83-68006-27-8
Nau, Nicole. 2023. Differential impact of colonial languages on written languages: A case study from Latvia in early 19th century. In: Nataliya Levkovych, ed. Diversity in Contact. Berlin: De Gruyter, 3–90. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111323756-001

HÉLÈNE DE PENANROS (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, Paris)
Hélène de Penanros is a professor of Lithuanian grammar at Inalco (Paris) and a researcher in linguistics at the SEDYL laboratory (CNRS UMR 8202). Her research in linguistics is structured around the question of the constitution of meaning, at the centre of which lies the problem of polysemy and synonymy, and more specifically, the identity of morpho-lexical units given the variation in their meaning according to context. Her research themes include prefix-preposition categorial ambivalence, the distinction between case and preposition, the definite/indefinite opposition, and the deconstruction of notions of time, cause, instrument or politeness. Her research in descriptive and theoretical linguistics has a strong didactics component. As a teacher-researcher, H. de Penanros believes that importing discoveries made in linguistics into language teaching methods is an under-exploited yet extremely fruitful source of renewal for the latter, provided that specific research is carried out to make these discoveries easily understandable.

Important recent publications
Du temps et de l'aspect dans les langues, Approches linguistiques de la temporalité, de Penanros, Thach (dir.), Peter Lang, Bruxelles, Berlin, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, Oxford, 338 p.,  2024.
"Un homme rare", Michel Chicouène (1936-2017): études russes et lituaniennes, Camus, de Penanros (dir.), Presses de l'Inalco: Paris, 272 p., 2021.

BEATA TRAWIŃSKI (Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim)
Dr. Beata Trawiński is a linguist specializing in grammar, corpus linguistics and contrastive linguistics, with a focus on Slavic and Germanic languages. She is a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim (Germany), where she leads projects on German grammar in European comparison. Dr. Trawiński received her Ph.D. in General and Computational Linguistics from the University of Tübingen (Germany), and her academic career includes research and teaching positions at the Universities of Tübingen, Vienna, Passau, Göttingen and Mannheim. Her research interests include propositional arguments, subject clauses, control, plurality, negation and negative polarity, multiword expressions, grammar engineering and multilingual corpora. Beata Trawiński also contributes to the European Reference Corpus (EuReCo) initiative and is co-founder and co-editor of the open access series IDSopen. She has co-organized several international conferences, including the 6th edition of the Grammar and Corpora conference, and has co-edited a number of volumes resulting from these events. The most recent of these are Grammar and Corpora (Heidelberg University Publishing 2018), Non-canonical Control in a Cross-linguistic Perspective (Benjamins 2021) and Linguistic Constructions (Special Issue of Languages in Contrast 2024).