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« UMass Linguists at the Fourth Biolinguistics Network Conference | Main | Alonso-Ovalle Dissertation Available from GLSA»

Talk by Wallenberg, Sigurðsson and Ingason May 11th (Icelandic Tree Banking)

On May 11th, there will be a special talk on the treebanking of Icelandic. Joel Wallenberg, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson, and Anton Karl Ingason will present their recent work in a talk titled "Extending the Comparative Dimension of Diachronic Syntax: A Parsed Corpus of Icelandic from the 12th Century to Modern Times."

The talk will be held in the Partee room from 11-12:30PM. An abstract is attached below:

In recent years, there have been a number of efforts to combine advanced theoretical work in comparative syntax with the well-established quantitative approach of sociolinguistics in order to develop a theoretically informed program of research into morphosyntactic variation with precise quantitative hypotheses and reproducible results. The construction of large, diachronic parsed corpora (Kroch and Taylor, 2000a; Kroch et al., 2004) has made this goal much more achievable by providing a body of data on which different researchers can test predictions about syntactic variation and change, and where they can challenge each other's results directly by referring to the same set of raw obervations (cf. repeated studies of the OV-to-VO change in early English: Pintzuk, 1991; Kroch and Taylor, 2000b; Haeberli, 2002; Trips, 2002; Pintzuk and Taylor, 2004; Wallenberg, 2009).

However, this emerging field has suffered from the lack of a robust comparative dimension, simply because comparable parsed diachronic corpora have not been available for many languages other than English. Our project is one step in the direction of improving the situation. In this talk we present an ongoing project that complements the precise and quantitative approach to morphosyntactic change which was first made possible by the construction of diachronic treebanks of English. Our project involves annotating a substantial amount of text from every century of written Icelandic with a full phrase structure parse, thus making it possible to study in detail the similarities and differences of the history of English and Icelandic syntax. Some of the changes, such as the change from OV to VO word order, were very similar, while others, such as the loss of morphological case in English, have increased the typological difference between the languages. Having a diachronic treebank of each language allows us to study the nature of the changes in detail, as well as the interface between different components of the grammar as evidenced by the statistical relationships between different changes.

While our project is still in its early stages we present some preliminary results from our corpus on the position of possessives and the structure of the DP, passives, and phrase structure change over time. These results are based on Icelandic data from the 12th century and the 19th century, and a comparison between our corpus and data from the much larger diachronic English corpora.

May 1, 2010 9:59 AM | 08:12 (2010-05-03)