Chapter published in:
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: 08 November 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.85.13far
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