Guest lecture: Fabian Helmrich

On 19 May, Fabian Helmrich, a PhD student in the final stages of his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, visited the University of Graz as part of the research focus ‘Multilingualism, Migration, Cultural Transformation’. Helmrich gave a guest lecture entitled ‘Verbal Aspect in Istro-Romanian’, drawing on extensive corpus data and his own field research.

His lecture centred on the question of how centuries of contact with Čakavian Croatian has profoundly altered the verb system of the two Istro-Romanian dialects, Vlåški and Žejånski. Helmrich highlighted which affixes and categories had been adopted from Čakavian and analysed how telicity, culminativity and durativity serve as key parameters for aspect specification in this endangered Romance language variant.

The lecture addressed the dynamics of multilingual contact (Istro-Romanian–Čakavian), the role of migration in shaping linguistic structures, and the transformation of a minority language through long-term contact. Helmrich’s work provides a compelling case study of how contact-induced changes take place at the level of grammatical aspect, and offers new insights for both Romance and Slavic linguistics.