An automatic part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German

Syntactically annotated corpora are highly important for enabling large-scale diachronic and diatopic language research. Such corpora have recently been developed for a variety of historical languages, or are still under development. One of those under development is the fully tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG), which is aimed at facilitating research into the highly under-researched diachronic syntax of Low German. The present paper reports on a crucial step in creating the corpus, viz. the creation of a part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German (MLG). Having been transmitted in several non-standardised written varieties, MLG poses a challenge to standard POS taggers, which usually rely on normalized spelling. We outline the major issues faced in the creation of the tagger and present our solutions to them

The Fashions of Snæfellsness: A case study of clothing and textiles in four sagas of Icelanders

The sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur) are an important part of European literary history. Both the sagas’ historical background and their literary techniques were studied intensely in the last century, but dress and fashion in Old Norse–Icelandic literature received comparatively little attention in this period. Moreover, the literary corpus and textile history have rarely been used to illuminate one another; however, as this article will demonstrate, synthesising data and methodological approaches from both fields can yield new knowledge about both historical textiles and the sagas. This article focuses on four of the sagas of Icelanders that are set on the Snæfellsnes peninsula: Bjarnar saga Hítdælakappa, Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, Eyrbyggja saga, and Víglundar saga. The central question the article poses is, how are social norms and cultural ideas reflected in clothing and textiles in these sagas? This study presents a comprehensive and multifaceted view of the textile and clothing imagery by combining qualitative and quantitative textual analysis showing how the imagery is an integral part of the narrative rather than an embellishment. The article reveals that clothing and textiles serve an array of functions in the sagas which are linked to the societal order. Several themes — such as masculinity, social rank, and the practice of magic — are shown to have a close connection with clothing as well as other textiles.

Order and structure in syntax II: Subjecthood and argument structure

This book reconsiders the role of order and structure in syntax, focusing on fundamental issues such as word order and grammatical functions. The first group of papers in the collection asks what word order can tell us about syntactic structure, using evidence from V2, object shift, word order gaps and different kinds of movement. The second group of papers all address the issue of subjecthood in some way, and examine how certain subject properties vary across languages: expression of subjects, expletive subjects, quirky and locative subjects. All of the papers address in some way the tension between modelling what can vary across languages whilst improving our understanding of what might be universal to human language.   This book is complemented by Order and structure in syntax I: Word order and syntactic structure &nbsp

Order and structure in syntax II: Subjecthood and argument structure

This book reconsiders the role of order and structure in syntax, focusing on fundamental issues such as word order and grammatical functions. The first group of papers in the collection asks what word order can tell us about syntactic structure, using evidence from V2, object shift, word order gaps and different kinds of movement. The second group of papers all address the issue of subjecthood in some way, and examine how certain subject properties vary across languages: expression of subjects, expletive subjects, quirky and locative subjects. All of the papers address in some way the tension between modelling what can vary across languages whilst improving our understanding of what might be universal to human language.   This book is complemented by Order and structure in syntax I: Word order and syntactic structure &nbsp

Order and structure in syntax II: Subjecthood and argument structure

This book reconsiders the role of order and structure in syntax, focusing on fundamental issues such as word order and grammatical functions. The first group of papers in the collection asks what word order can tell us about syntactic structure, using evidence from V2, object shift, word order gaps and different kinds of movement. The second group of papers all address the issue of subjecthood in some way, and examine how certain subject properties vary across languages: expression of subjects, expletive subjects, quirky and locative subjects. All of the papers address in some way the tension between modelling what can vary across languages whilst improving our understanding of what might be universal to human language.   This book is complemented by Order and structure in syntax I: Word order and syntactic structure &nbsp

Order and structure in syntax II: Subjecthood and argument structure

This book reconsiders the role of order and structure in syntax, focusing on fundamental issues such as word order and grammatical functions. The first group of papers in the collection asks what word order can tell us about syntactic structure, using evidence from V2, object shift, word order gaps and different kinds of movement. The second group of papers all address the issue of subjecthood in some way, and examine how certain subject properties vary across languages: expression of subjects, expletive subjects, quirky and locative subjects. All of the papers address in some way the tension between modelling what can vary across languages whilst improving our understanding of what might be universal to human language.   This book is complemented by Order and structure in syntax I: Word order and syntactic structure &nbsp

Order and structure in syntax II: Subjecthood and argument structure

This book reconsiders the role of order and structure in syntax, focusing on fundamental issues such as word order and grammatical functions. The first group of papers in the collection asks what word order can tell us about syntactic structure, using evidence from V2, object shift, word order gaps and different kinds of movement. The second group of papers all address the issue of subjecthood in some way, and examine how certain subject properties vary across languages: expression of subjects, expletive subjects, quirky and locative subjects. All of the papers address in some way the tension between modelling what can vary across languages whilst improving our understanding of what might be universal to human language.   This book is complemented by Order and structure in syntax I: Word order and syntactic structure &nbsp

Order and structure in syntax II: Subjecthood and argument structure

This book reconsiders the role of order and structure in syntax, focusing on fundamental issues such as word order and grammatical functions. The first group of papers in the collection asks what word order can tell us about syntactic structure, using evidence from V2, object shift, word order gaps and different kinds of movement. The second group of papers all address the issue of subjecthood in some way, and examine how certain subject properties vary across languages: expression of subjects, expletive subjects, quirky and locative subjects. All of the papers address in some way the tension between modelling what can vary across languages whilst improving our understanding of what might be universal to human language.   This book is complemented by Order and structure in syntax I: Word order and syntactic structure &nbsp

Order and structure in syntax II: Subjecthood and argument structure

This book reconsiders the role of order and structure in syntax, focusing on fundamental issues such as word order and grammatical functions. The first group of papers in the collection asks what word order can tell us about syntactic structure, using evidence from V2, object shift, word order gaps and different kinds of movement. The second group of papers all address the issue of subjecthood in some way, and examine how certain subject properties vary across languages: expression of subjects, expletive subjects, quirky and locative subjects. All of the papers address in some way the tension between modelling what can vary across languages whilst improving our understanding of what might be universal to human language.   This book is complemented by Order and structure in syntax I: Word order and syntactic structure &nbsp

Order and structure in syntax II: Subjecthood and argument structure

This book reconsiders the role of order and structure in syntax, focusing on fundamental issues such as word order and grammatical functions. The first group of papers in the collection asks what word order can tell us about syntactic structure, using evidence from V2, object shift, word order gaps and different kinds of movement. The second group of papers all address the issue of subjecthood in some way, and examine how certain subject properties vary across languages: expression of subjects, expletive subjects, quirky and locative subjects. All of the papers address in some way the tension between modelling what can vary across languages whilst improving our understanding of what might be universal to human language.   This book is complemented by Order and structure in syntax I: Word order and syntactic structure &nbsp