Chapter 7
Syntactic changes in verbal clauses and noun phrases from 1500 onwards
Can the promise of data-driven methods hold in historical linguistics? Can they detect salient syntactic changes and open new research avenues? I first use data-driven measures to detect patterns in the ARCHER corpus. Secondly, I qualitatively interpret the differences and build hypotheses. Thirdly, I validate these, with the Penn Corpora, investigating frequency and creativity. We observe several trends – among them: verbal (‘Doric’) style is decreasing, nominal (‘Attic’) style is increasing. A cascade from full to non-finite clause, and from paratactic to hypotactic style unfolds. Furthermore, constituent order is increasingly becoming fixed, strengthening the principle of dependency length minimisation. While data-driven approaches entail a complex interpretation step, their holistic perspective goes beyond well-trodden envelopes of variation to more global language models.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Preparing the corpora
- 2.1Data
- 2.2Methods of data preparation
- 2.3Evaluation of spelling normalisation, tagger and parser
- 2.4Querying the manually annotated corpora
- 3.Findings from the diagnostic step on ARCHER
- 4.Participial clauses
- 5.From verbal to nominal
- 5.1Verb/noun ratio
- 5.2Verb and noun modification
- 5.3Changes in productivity
- 6.Noun compression
- 7.From full clause to non-finite clause
- 8.Information structure
- 9.Conclusions
-
Notes
-
References
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Zehentner, Eva, Marianne Hundt, Gerold Schneider & Melanie Röthlisberger
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