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English Historical Linguistics: Change in structure and meaning
Edited by Bettelou Los, Claire Cowie, Patrick Honeybone and Graeme Trousdale
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 358] 2022
► pp. 163–200

Chapter 7
Syntactic changes in verbal clauses and noun phrases from 1500 onwards

| University of Zurich

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.

Keywords: data-driven methods, syntax, ARCHER corpus, Penn Parsed Corpora, Penn Treebank, nominal style, entropy, word order, information structure
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
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.358.07sch
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