Quirky Quotes and Needles in the Haystack: Tracing Grammatical Change in Untagged Corpora

This paper discusses pivotal theoretical and methodological problems of historical corpus linguistics. In two case studies from Swedish language history, the development of the epistemic adverb kanske and the group genitive respectively, it illustrates how the use of qualitative method in addition to corpus investigation can contribute to understanding grammatical change

Approximation in Morphology

This Special Issue "Approximation in Morphology" has been collated from peer-reviewed papers presented at the ApproxiMo 'discontinuous' workshop (2022), which was held online between December 2021 and May 2022, and organized by Francesca Masini (Bologna), Muriel Norde (Berlin) and Kristel Van Goethem (Louvain)

Version 1.0

The Birgitta-Notker-Korpus (BiNoKo) is a resource dedicated to comparative research on historical registers. These guidelines include information about the corpus design, annotation layers, meta data, and annotation principles. The corpus comprises two sources: The Old High German Book of Psalms by Notker III of Saint Gall and the Old Swedish Revelations of Birgitta of Sweden.Peer Reviewe

Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation

The Collaborative Research Center 1412 “Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412) investigates the role of register in language, focusing in particular on what constitutes a language user’s register knowledge and which situational-functional factors determine a user’s choices. The following paper is an extract from the frame text of the proposal for the CRC 1412, which was submitted to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2019, followed by a successful onsite evaluation that took place in 2019. The CRC 1412 then started its work on January 1, 2020. The theoretical part of the frame text gives an extensive overview of the theoretical and empirical perspectives on register knowledge from the viewpoint of 2019. Due to the high collaborative effort of all PIs involved, the frame text is unique in its scope on register research, encompassing register-relevant aspects from variationist approaches, psycholinguistics, grammatical theory, acquisition theory, historical linguistics, phonology, phonetics, typology, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics, as well as qualitative and quantitative modeling. Although our positions and hypotheses since its submission have developed further, the frame text is still a vital resource as a compilation of state-of-the-art register research and a documentation of the start of the CRC 1412. The theoretical part without administrative components therefore presents an ideal starter publication to kick off the CRC’s publication series REALIS. For an overview of the projects and more information on the CRC, see https://sfb1412.hu-berlin.de/

Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods

In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center “Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define “register” as recurring variation in language use depending on the function of language and on the social situation. Informed by rich data, we aim to better understand and model the knowledge involved in situation- and function-based use of language register. In order to achieve this goal, we are using complementary methods and measures. In the review, we start by clarifying the concept of “register”, by reviewing the state of the art, and by setting out our methods and modeling goals. Against this background, we discuss three key challenges, two at the methodological level and one at the theoretical level: (1) To better uncover registers in text and spoken corpora, we propose changes to established analytical approaches. (2) To tease apart between-subject variability from the linguistic variability at issue (intra-individual situation-based register variability), we use within-subject designs and the modeling of individuals' social, language, and educational background. (3) We highlight a gap in cognitive modeling, viz. modeling the mental representations of register (processing), and present our first attempts at filling this gap. We argue that the targeted use of multiple complementary methods and measures supports investigating the pervasiveness of register phenomena and yields comprehensive insights into the cross-methodological robustness of register-related language variability. These comprehensive insights in turn provide a solid foundation for associated cognitive modeling.Peer Reviewe

Facing interfaces

It has long been recognized that many instances of change that have been discussed within the framework of grammaticalization studies notoriously defy categorization, for instance because they share properties of grammaticalization and lexicalization (Brinton & Traugott 2005), or because they share some properties of grammaticalization, but not all of them, as in the case of discourse markers (e.g. Ocampo 2006). In order to avoid these classification issues, we will argue that it is more useful to reduce grammaticalization and related changes to their “main mechanisms” (formal reanalysis and semantic reinterpretation), “primitive changes” (micro-changes on the levels of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and/or discourse), and “side effects” (e.g. obligatorification or layering). In grammaticalization and related changes, formal reanalysis and semantic reinterpretation tend to coincide with different sets of primitive changes. Primitive changes will be defined as ternary parameters with the values reduction, expansion, or zero, and it will be seen that they tend to cluster in different ways. Some of these clusters may coincide with changes traditionally labeled “grammaticalization”, “degrammaticalization”, or “lexicalization”, but changes may also cluster in alternative ways. This novel approach to composite changes we term the “clustering approach”, and we aim to show that this model of analysis allows for a more fine-grained account of composite changes than definition-based taxonomies.Peer Reviewe