This paper illustrates how enriched diachronic treebank data can shed new light on an old and vexed topic, even when that topic is primarily morphological and semantic in nature rather than syntactic. The topic is the rise of the Russian po delimitatives, a change seen as crucial in most accounts… read more
This paper illustrates how enriched diachronic treebank data can shed new light on an old and vexed topic, even when that topic is primarily morphological and semantic in nature rather than syntactic. The topic is the rise of the Russian po delimitatives, a change seen as crucial in most… read more
This paper is a contrastive study of spatial encodings in the Greek manuscript of the New Testament and their parallels in Latin, Gothic, Classical Armenian and Old Church Slavic. Our data comes from the PROIEL corpus (University of Oslo). We take a strictly data-driven approach in this study and… read more
In this article we focus on one grammaticalization path to perfective markers, that of the so-called ‘bounder perfectives’ (Bybee & Dahl 1989). Systems with these kinds of perfective markers – often called ‘Slavic-style aspect’ – are particularly elaborated in the Slavic languages. To examine why… read more
This article discusses the theory and practice of givenness annotation as applied in the PROIEL corpus, a corpus of old Indo-European New Testament translations. The annotation scheme that we use is based on Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). In the first part, we show how our tags relate to… read more
This paper takes a strictly empirical approach to the encoding of spatial notions in the four ancient Indo-European languages Ancient Greek, Latin, Gothic and Old Church Slavonic. By generating semantic maps on the basis of parallel corpus data, without any semantic pre-analysis, we use methods… read more
This article explores the usefulness of a usage-based constructional approach to syntactic change. Case constructions are particularly interesting data in this respect, because of their prominent semantic features. A corpus study of the history of Old Russian possessive constructions is taken as an… read more