Stefan Höfler

I am a historical linguist focusing on nominal morphology (both inflection and derivation), morphosyntax (gender and agreement), sound change, and derivational semantics.

As a passionate Indo-Europeanist, my main languages are Ancient Greek and Latin (from a linguistic as well as a philological perspective), the Celtic languages, and Tocharian. Besides, I also work on non-Indo-European languages, above all Modern Hebrew and Hungarian.

Within Ancient Greek, I specialize in Homeric linguistics, in Greek historical phonology and dialectology, and in word-formation. In Latin, my research is concerned with both synchronic and diachronic grammar, etymology, and Latin inscriptions from all periods.

I received my PhD in Indo-European Linguistics from the University of Vienna, Austria in summer 2017.

After a postdoc lecturer position at Harvard University (2017–2018) and a postdoc research position at the University of Copenhagen (2019–2021), I am currently the recipient of a postdoc fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Vienna.

If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email.

News

09/12/2023

Today is the first day of this year's Arbeitstagung of the Indo-European Society, organized by the amazing colleagues of Cologne University. I have the honor of opening the conference as the first speaker of the first session. I will present research on the Old Latin amāssō type, a fascinating and still not fully understood category. Here is the handout.

06/30/2023

While I'm attending the Workshop Relative Chronology in Historical Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, two papers of mine have been published in the latest issue of Die Sprache: a review of Thomas Lindner's Urindogermanische Grammatik, and an article entitled "Ein urindogermanischer Seitensprung. Griechisch μοιχός ‘Ehebrecher’ und urgermanisch *maigaz ‘schamlos’".

06/20/2023

Today, I am going to Prague for the 22nd International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics. My talk will be about the operation of Rix's Law in Latin and Italic. Spoiler alert: there was no such thing as Rix's Law in Italic, so the outcomes of word-initial *HR̥C clusters were identical to the outcomes of *R̥C clusters, that is, for Latin: em/nC (potentially raised to im/nC) for the nasals and or/lC (potentially raised to ur/lC) for the liquids.