Ezra la Roi is a postdoctoral research fellow at Ghent University. Funded by a fundamental research grant from the Scientific Research Foundation of Flanders (2023-2026), he is investigating the histories of performative patterns from Ancient into Post-Classical Greek (500 BCE - 600 CE).
He completed his studies (bachelor and research master Classics) at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam in 2018, specializing in Ancient Greek linguistics. His research master thesis, Hidden Potential: the Meaning of the Optative in its Combination with Particles and Adverbs, was supervised by Rutger Allan (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Jesús de la Villa (Universidad Autónoma Madrid). In 2017 and 2018, Ezra went on research stays to the Universidad Autónoma Madrid to conduct research for his thesis and prepare his PhD proposal, funded by the Travel Grant Graduate School of Humanities (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), an Erasmus+ internship grant and a travel grant from the Philological study fund (Leiden).
Between 2019 and 2022, he wrote his PhD, titled Counterfactuals in Ancient Greek. Pragmatics, life cycles and connected pathways. His PhD was supervised by Klaas Bentein (Ugent) and Rutger Allan (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). For his PhD, he went on a research exchange with Cambridge University in 2022, hosted by James Clackson, to further develop and finetune his ongoing work. Since his PhD was a PhD-by-Publication, the 9 papers which together make up his dissertation are published in a large variety of leading journals in the fields that the topic covers, such as Folia Linguistica Historica, Classical Philology and Indogermanische Forschungen. In 2024, his dissertation won the third prize for the best dissertation in the field of Indo-European linguistics.
During his PhD, Ezra has also collaborated with fellow linguists and papyrologists in three international projects:
(1) A Typology of Habituals, PI Kees Hengeveld (University of Amsterdam). We are devising a novel typology of habitual constructions across languages. Ezra is contributing studies on habitual and generic constructions in Ancient Greek, extending previously published work on these topics.
(2) Pragmatics in Cyclical language change, PI Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (University of Manchester). This network collects researchers interested in cyclical processes of language change. Ezra contributes studies on the life cycles of counterfactual constructions.
(3) Everyday Writing in Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt. A Socio-Semiotic Study of Communicative Variation (EVWRIT), PI Klaas Bentein (Ghent University). This ERC project aims to create a novel socio-semiotic approach to communicative variation in Greek papyri from Egypt.
Ezra’s main research interests are counterfactuals, mood and modality, tense-aspect, and syntax. In his work, he tries to combine the most recent insights from theoretical linguistics (esp. linguistic typology & pragmatics) with rigorous corpus-based analyses of various stages of Ancient Greek, Latin and other Indo-European languages.
Please see https://ezralaroi.com/ for the most recent pdfs of articles