The Research Unit on Language Acquisition and Pedagogy has the pleasure of inviting you to a guest lecture by visiting PhD student Tania Ahmad (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland) on:

Who did what, to whom in Old English

English has changed dramatically over time. One important change concerns how the language identifies who is doing something and who is receiving the action. While Modern English mainly depends on word order, Old English used a more complex system of grammatical markers. This lecture explores how speakers of Old English expressed these relationships and what this reveals about the structure of the language.

In linguistic typology, the study of the relationship between a verb and its participants is known as argument realization. Argument realization concerns how participants in an event are represented and encoded in language. The expression of argument structure involves a range of morphosyntactic properties, including alignment, subjecthood, and transitivity prominence.

In this presentation, Tania Ahmad will examine these three properties in Old English and present preliminary results from her PhD project on argument realization in the early Germanic languages, including Old English, Old Norse, and Gothic. The talk will discuss how these languages encoded grammatical relations and what this can tell us about the development of argument structure in the history of Germanic languages.

The lecture, which will be held in English, will take place on Monday 15 June 2026, 11:00–12:00 in room 1485-316. Everyone is welcome! Tania would be delighted to receive feedback on her ongoing PhD project.

Organizer: Joost Robbe