Cover not available
Part of
Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change
Edited by Richard J. Whitt
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 85] 2018
► pp. 281–300

The interplay between genre variation and syntax in a historical Low German corpus

| Ghent University
| University of Konstanz
| University of Cambridge
| Ghent University
In this chapter, we focus on the choice of different genres in the Middle Low German part of the tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German and its implications for syntax. We discuss how the inclusion or exclusion of genres has an impact on the study and the discovery of syntactic phenomena in Middle Low German, such as null referential subjects, resumptive pronouns, relative particles and gaps in coordinations. This interplay between genre and syntax also influences parsing decisions. Furthermore, we look at the influence of (sparse) punctuation on (automatically) tagging the corpus itself, and how a closer study of genre-specific syntactic elements contributes to the improvement of the accuracy of automatic classifiers.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A parsed corpus of Middle Low German
  • 3.Syntactic variation and the role of genre in the corpus
    • 3.1Discourse markers
    • 3.2Null pronominal arguments
      • 3.2.1Referential null subjects
      • 3.2.2Pronominal gaps in alse-clauses
      • 3.2.3Null resumptives in non-restrictive relative clauses
      • 3.2.4Pronominal gaps in asymmetric coordinations
  • 4.Summary and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.85.13far
References (29)
References
Anagnostopoulou, Elena. 2008. Notes on the Person Case Constraint in Germanic (with special reference to German). In Agreement Restrictions, Roberta D’Alessandro, Susann Fischer & Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson (eds), 15–48. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Barteld, Fabian, Dreessen, Katharina, Ihden, Sarah, Schröder, Ingrid, Glawe, Meike, Kleymann, Verena, Nagel, Norbert, Peters, Robert & Schilling, Elmar. 2014. Transkriptionshandbuch des Projekts Referenzkorpus Mittelniederdeutsch/ Niederrheinisch (1200–1650) (Version 1. August 2014, Auszug). <[URL]>
Breitbarth, Anne. 2014. The History of Low German Negation. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dipper, Stefanie, Donhauser, Karin, Klein, Thomas, Linde, Sonja, Müller, Stefan & Wegera, Klaus-Peter. 2013. HiTS: Ein Tagset für historische Sprachstufen des Deutschen. JLCL 28(1): 85–137.Google Scholar
Dreessen, Katharina & Ihden, Sarah. 2015. Korpuslinguistische Studien zur mittelniederdeutschen Syntax. Jahrbuch für Germanistische Sprachgeschichte 6(1): 249–275. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ebert, Robert Peter, Reichmann, Oskar, Solms, Hans-Joachim & Wegera, Klaus-Peter. 1993. Frühneuhochdeutsche Grammatik. Tübingen: Niemeyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Farasyn, Melissa. 2017a. Kongruenzmuster in mittelniederdeutschen Relativsätzen: Eine Pilotstudie. In Aktuelle Tendenzen in der Variationslinguistik (Kleine und regionale Sprachen), Line-Marie Hohenstein, Kathrin Weber, Heike Wermer, Meike Glawe & Stephanie Sauermilch (eds), 67–90. Hildesheim: Georg Olms.Google Scholar
. 2017b. Deletion in the verbal paradigm in Middle Low German: An interface phenomenon. Ms, Ghent University.
Farasyn, Melissa & Breitbarth, Anne. 2016a. Nullsubjekte im Mittelniederdeutschen. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur 138(4): 524–559. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2016b. Null Subjects in Middle Low German. Ms, Ghent University.
Farasyn, Melissa, Witzenhausen, Elisabeth & Breitbarth, Anne. 2016. Anmerkungen zur mittelniederdeutschen Syntax in Psalmenübersetzungen des (14. und) 15. Jahrhunderts. Ms, Ghent University.
Fedders, Wolfgang. 1988. Zur Erhebung historischer Schreibsprachdaten aus der Textsorte ‘Urkunde’. Niederdeutsches Wort 28: 61–74.Google Scholar
Galves, Charlotte; Andrade, Aroldo Leal de; and Faria, Pablo. 2017. Tycho Brahe Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese. URL: [URL].
Holmberg, Anders. 2010. Null subject parameters. In Parametric Variation: Null Subjects in Minimalist Theory, Theresa Biberauer, Anders Holmberg, Ian Roberts & Michelle Sheehan (eds), 88–124. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Ito, Junko and Armin Mester. 2000. Ich, der ich sechzig bin: An Agreement Puzzle, in Chung, Sandy, Jim McCloskey, and Nathan Sanders, eds. Jorge Hankamer Webfest. URL: [URL]Google Scholar
Koleva, Mariya, Farasyn, Melissa, Desmet, Bart, Breitbarth, Anne & Hoste, Veronique. 2017. An automatic part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22(1): 108–141. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lenerz, Jürgen. 1977. Zur Abfolge nominaler Satzglieder im Deutschen. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Mähl, Stefan. 2014. Mehrgliedrige Verbalkomplexe im Mittelniederdeutschen. Ein Beitrag zu einer historischen Syntax des Deutschen. Köln: Böhlau.Google Scholar
Paul, Hemann. 252007. Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik, neu bearb. von Thomas Klein, Hans-Joachim Solms & Klaus-Peter Wegera. Mit einer Syntax von Ingeborg Schöbler, neu bearb. von Heiz Peter Prell. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Peters, Robert. 1973. Mittelniederdeutsche Sprache. Niederdeutsch. Sprache und Literatur 1: 66–129.Google Scholar
. 2003. Variation und Ausgleich in den mittelniederdeutschen Schreibsprachen. In The Dawn of the Written Vernacular in Western Europe, Michèle Goyens & Werner Verbeke (eds), 427–440. Leuven: Leuven University Press.Google Scholar
Petrova, Svetlana. 2012. Multiple XP-fronting in Middle Low German root clauses. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 15(2): 157–188. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reich, Ingo. 2009. 'Asymmetrische Koordination' im Deutschen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.Google Scholar
Truswell, Robert, Alcorn, Rhona & Donaldson, James. 2016. A parsed linguistic atlas of Early Middle English. Paper presented at the first Angus McIntosh Centre symposium, June 10, 2016. Slides available at <[URL]>
Trutkowski, Ewa & Weiß, Helmut. 2016. When personal pronouns compete with relative pronouns. In The Impact of Pronominal Form on Interpretation, Patrick Grosz & Pritty Patel-Grosz (eds), 135–166. Berlin: De Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wackernagel, Jacob. 1892. Über ein Gesetz der indogermanischen Wortstellung. Indogermanische Forschungen 1: 333–436. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walkden, George. 2014. Syntactic Reconstruction and Proto-Germanic. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2016. The HeliPaD: A parsed corpus of Old Saxon. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 21(4): 559–571. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wallenberg, Joel C., Ingason, Anton Karl, Sigurðsson, Einar Freyr & Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur. 2011. Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus (IcePaHC), Version 0.9. <[URL]>Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Corr, Alice
2022. Numeral Reduplication and Clausal Syntax: Grammaticalized Distributivity in Medieval Iberia. Probus 34:2 ► pp. 317 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.