Over the last few decades, the widespread diffusion of digital technology has increased availability of primary textual sources, radically changing the everyday life of scholars in the humanities, who are now able to access, query and process a wealth of empirical evidence in ways not possible before. Also for ancient languages, corpora enhanced with increasingly complex layers of metalinguistic information, such as part-of-speech tagging and syntactic annotation (called 'treebanks') are now available. In particular, diachronic treebanks, which provide data for a language across several historical stages of a given language, allow for a new approach to diachronic studies of syntactic phenomena where scholars previously had to content themselves with empirical work on a much smaller scale. This volume brings together a set of papers that report research on various diachronic matters supported by evidence from diachronic treebanks. The contents of the papers cover a wide range of languages, including English, French, Russian, Old Church Slavonic, Latin and Ancient Greek. Originally published as special issue of Diachronica 35:3 (2018).

This book examines in detail the forms and functions of clause combination in English. Using a corpus linguistics methodology, it describes how the English clause system currently behaves, how it has developed over the history of the language, and how the features and properties of English clause combination have important theoretical and empirical significance. Adopting the cognitive-functional Adaptive Approach to grammar, it offers a series of interconnected studies that investigate how English clause combination interacts with the properties of coherence and cohesion in discourse across historical time, as well in contemporary language use. This work contributes to the ever-increasing common ground between corpus linguistics and cognitive-functional linguistics, producing new paths for interdisciplinary research.

This book is an innovative guide to quantitative, corpus-based research in historical and diachronic linguistics. Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray argue that, although historical linguistics has been successful in using the comparative method, the field lags behind other branches of linguistics with respect to adopting quantitative methods. Here they provide a theoretically agnostic description of a new framework for quantitatively assessing models and hypotheses in historical linguistics, based on corpus data and using case studies to illustrate how this framework can answer research questions in historical linguistics. The authors offer an in-depth explanation and discussion of the benefits of working with quantitative methods, corpus data, and corpus annotation, and the advantages of open and reproducible research. The book will be a valuable resource for graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, as well as for all those working with linguistic corpora.

This volume discusses topics of historical syntax from different theoretical perspectives, ranging from Indo-European studies to generative grammar, functionalism, and typology. It examines mechanisms of syntactic change such as reanalysis, analogy, grammaticalization, independent drift, and language contact, as well as procedures of syntactic reconstruction. More than one factor is considered to explain a syntactic phenomenon, since it is maintained that an accurate account of multiple causations, of both structural and social nature, is to be preferred to considerations of economy. Special attention is given to the relationship between principles of syntactic theory and a search for data reliability through the methods of corpus linguistics. Data are drawn from a variety of languages, including Hittite, Vedic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Romance, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Austroasiatic, Gulf of Guinea creoles. The book may be therefore of interest for specialists of these languages in addition to scholars and advanced students of syntax and historical linguistics.

Nowadays, linguists do not question the existence of synchronic variation, and the dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony. They recognize that synchrony can be motivated regionally (diatopic variation), sociolinguistically (diastratic variation), or stylistically (diaphasic variation). But, further, they can also recognize the hybrid nature of synchrony, which is referred to as "dynamic synchrony." This conception of synchrony assumes that similar patterns of usage can coexist in a community during a certain period and that their mutual relations are not static but conflicting enough to result in a future systematic change through symptomatic synchronic variation. Emergence of a large corpus of written texts for some languages has enabled quantitative as well as qualitative analyses of the synchronic conditions for diachronic changes, over both long and short spans of time. Most of the 14 papers in this volume represent studies on synchronic and diachronic variations based on such corpus data. For sale in all countries except Japan. For customers in Japan: please contact Yushodo Co.

This book showcases the state of the art in the corpus-based linguistics of medieval Celtic languages. Its chapters detail theoretical advances in analysing variation/change in the Celtic languages and computational tools necessary to process/analyse the data. Many contributions situate the Celtic material in the broader field of corpus-based diachronic linguistics. The application of computational methods to Celtic languages is in its infancy and this book is a first in medieval Celtic Studies, which has mainly concentrated on philological endeavours such as editorial and literary work. The Celtic languages represent a new frontier in the development of NLP tools because they pose special challenges, like complicated inflectional morphology with non-straightforward mappings between lemmata and attested forms, irregular orthography, and consonant mutations. With so much data available in non-electronic form and ongoing efforts to convert these data to computer-readable format, there is much room for the developing/testing of new tools. This books provides an overview of this process at a crucial time in the development of the field and aims to the data accessible to computational linguists with an interest in diachronic change.

The digital age has had a profound effect on our cultural heritage and the academic research that studies it. Staggering amounts of objects, many of them of a textual nature, are being digitised to make them more readily accessible to both experts and laypersons. Besides a vast potential for more effective and efficient preservation, management, and presentation, digitisation offers opportunities to work with cultural heritage data in ways that were never feasible or even imagined. To explore and exploit these possibilities, an interdisciplinary approach is needed, bringing together experts from cultural heritage, the social sciences and humanities on the one hand, and information technology on the other. Due to a prevalence of textual data in these domains, language technology has a crucial role to play in this endeavour. Language technology can break through the "Google barrier" by offering the potential to analyse texts at advanced levels, extracting information and knowledge at the level of the humanities or social sciences researcher, who wants to know about the who, what, where, and when, but also the how and the why. At the same time cultural heritage data poses considerable challenges for existing language technology: technology aimed at "generic" language has to face such disparate problems as historical language variation, OCR digitisation errors, and near-extinct academic expertise. This book is primarily intended for researchers in information technology and language processing who would like to receive a state-of-the-art overview of the whole breadth of the new and vibrant field of language technology for cultural heritage and its associated academic research in the humanities and social sciences. Researchers working in the target domains of cultural heritage, the social sciences and humanities will also find this book useful, as it provides an overview of how language technology can help them with their information needs. The book covers applications ranging from pre-processing and data cleaning, to the adaptation and compilation of linguistic resources, to personalisation, narrative analysis, visualisation and retrieval.

The impact of the ecclesiastical languages Greek, Latin and Church Slavonic on the Slavic standard languages still lacks a systematic analysis in the theoretical framework of contact linguistics. Based on corpus data, this volume offers an account in the light of “literacy language contact”, i.e. contact between varieties that are used only in a written variant and only in formal registers. Latin was used as literary language in medieval Slavia Romana; Greek was the source language for Church Slavonic, which, in turn, was the literary language for many Slavonic speaking communities and thus had an enormous impact on the development of the modern Slavonic standard languages. The book offers in-depth analyses of the impact of Latin on pre-Standard Slavonic varieties, the influence of Greek on (Old) Church Slavonic and the role of Church Slavonic as a source language for Old and Modern Russian. The contributions discuss (morpho)syntactic phenomena such as non-finite clauses, relative clauses, word order, the use and function of case and tense forms. The volume addresses Slavists, General linguists and scholars of Classical Philology interested in language contact and syntactic issues.

This volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of the intersecting fields of corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, and genre-based studies of language usage. Papers in this collection are devoted to presenting relevant methods pertinent to corpus-based studies of the connection between genre and language change, linguistic changes that occur in particular genres, and specific diachronic phenomena that are influenced by genre factors to greater and lesser degrees. Data are drawn from a number of languages, and the scope of the studies presented here is both short- and long-term, covering cases of recent change as well as more long-term alterations.

The language of Postclassical Greek is a somewhat neglected area of research despite the language of this period being well attested with a large number of different sorts of texts ranging from papyri and dialect inscriptions to literary texts by Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine writers. These texts offer an extensive amount of data and are rather understudied in comparison with texts of the Classical period. This volume aims to fill some of this void by offering an interdisciplinary approach to the language of the period. As such, it brings together contributions from disciplines including usage-based linguistics, theoretical syntax, historical linguistics, papyrology and palaeography, sociolinguistics and research on multilingualism. It is hoped, therefore, that the volume will appeal to a wide audience interested in exploring language development from several perspectives.