Althea Rosa Ludovica Sovani

I could not tell whether my passion for language first came from my passion for writing, or vice versa. Grammar has always been my deepest interest. I hold a BA in Classics with Oriental Studies (Sanskrit) and an MPhil in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics from Oxford. My BA was funded by the Thatcher Scholarship Programme at Somerville College and my MPhil by the Ertegun Scholarship Programme in the Humanities.

Until now, my research has aimed to combine my interest in language with my interest in the history of grammatical thinking and in theoretical linguistics. My BA thesis explored the ways in which two ancient Greek and Indian grammarians conceptualised the linguistic phenomenon of suppletion. With my MPhil thesis, supervised by Dr John Lowe, I turned to the fascinating world of infinitives, which, by posing challenges to standard definitions of grammatical categories, raise questions on both language per se and its formal analysis.

In my MPhil, I focused on early Vedic Sanskrit, in which infinitives are particularly difficult to identify, because of their morphological overlap with nominal cases and the ambiguities of Vedic poetic syntax. In my DPhil, I will engage with infinitives in Ancient Greek and extend my work on Vedic to other Indo-Iranian languages, particularly Avestan.

I love composing in Ancient Greek and Latin, and I have won the first prize in all the competitions run by the Faculty of Classics at Oxford. I have also been awarded prizes for my results in both my BA and MPhil examinations.