09 Philosophisch-historische Fakultät
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/10
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Item Open Access An overview of contact-induced morphosyntactic changes in Early English(2023) Walkden, George; Klemola, Juhani; Rainsford, ThomasThis chapter gives an overview of changes in morphology and syntax during the medieval English period that are plausibly induced or catalysed by language contact. Our emphasis is on accurately characterising the contact situations involved, and evaluating the evidence, rather than exhaustively listing every possible contact-induced change, and so the discussion is structured around a few case studies involving each of the three languages that medieval English was in most intense contact with: British Celtic, Old Norse, and Old French. We compare and contrast the contact situations in terms of van Coetsem’s (1988) distinction between borrowing and imposition and Trudgill’s (2011) framework of sociolinguistic typology.Item Open Access Metrical annotation for a verse treebank(2014) Rainsford, Thomas; Scrivner, OlgaWe present a methodology for enriching treebanks containing verse texts with metrical annotation, and present a pilot corpus containing one Old Occitan text. Metrical annotation is based on syllable tokens, and is generated semi-automatically using two algorithms, one to divide word tokens into syllables, and a second to mark the position of each syllable in the line. Syntactic and metrical annotation is combined in a single multi-layered ANNIS corpus. Three initial findings based on the pilot corpus illustrate the close relation between syntactic and metrical structure, and hence the value of enriching treebanks in this way.Item Open Access Tolerating subject-experiencers? Yang’s Tolerance Principle applied to psych verbs under contact in Middle English(2022) Trips, Carola; Rainsford, ThomasThis article investigates the acquisition of psych verbs in diachrony by applying Yang’s (2016) Tolerance and Sufficiency principles. It has been observed that psych verbs change from expressing the EXPERIENCER as object to expressing it as subject cross-linguistically. According to van Gelderen (2018) and others, this development has also taken place in the history of English. What is much less well-known, however, is that a considerable number of Old French psych verbs were copied to Middle English. Using lexicon-based and corpus-based data, we will apply Yang’s (2016) Tolerance and Sufficiency Principles to evaluate historical “tipping points” in the development of the psych verb class, i.e. examine whether either amuse-type or admire-type argument structures were productive in Middle English. Since subject-EXPERIENCERS were commonly used with intransitive and reflexive constructions we will further investigate whether a more general rule that any psych verb may take a subject-EXPERIENCER passed the productivity threshold. We will show that this was indeed the case in Middle English and that the copying of Old French verbs accelerated this development.