09 Philosophisch-historische Fakultät
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/10
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Item Open Access Des accents, ou de l'intonation? : la prosodie au XVIe siècle selon Meigret(2021) Rainsford, ThomasItem Open Access New insights into the typology of motion in the history of French: evidence from the manner verb lexicon(2024) Piccione, Mariapaola; Rainsford, ThomasOur study aims to investigate the Talmyan typology of motion encoding in the history of French focusing on testing Slobin’s (1997, 2004) hypothesis stating that the proportion of manner verbs is greater in s-framed languages and Schøsler’s (2008) hypothesis stating that the difference between s-framed and v-framed languages is to be found in the use of manner verbs and that the nature of the texts might play a role. Our study is methodologically innovative since it tests these hypotheses against a very large dataset using tailored measures. Our findings show an increase in manner saliency (as defined in Slobin 1997, 2004), contrary to what we would expect. This increase in the proportion of manner verbs might be explained by a more general increase in the overall lexical diversity of motion expression in French. Moreover, our results support Schøsler’s hypothesis, as textual factors affect the use of manner verbs.Item Open Access Old Gallo-Romance (OGR) Corpus : annotation phonologique et métrique des plus anciens textes gallo-romans(2022) Rainsford, ThomasThe goal of the Old Gallo-Romance (OGR) Corpus is to unite in a single corpus all Gallo-Romance texts copied before 1130 in a form as faithful as possible to the base manuscript and annotated in depth. In particular, the corpus contains both phonological and metrical layers of annotation. In this article, we present the main innovations implemented in the OGR corpus, with special focus on the creation of a technical infrastructure which assists in the creation of this annotation and exports it in an XML format.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.Item Open Access De-prefixed spatial Ps in medieval French(2019) Rainsford, ThomasWe examine a series of medieval French spatial Ps with de- prefixes (de-forms; e.g. dessus, dedans), showing that they display a combination of preposition-, adverb- and noun-like syntactic properties which distinguish them from their corresponding base forms (e.g. sus, ens). We argue that these properties can best be accounted for by considering de-forms to be modifiers of a null PLACE noun. Finally, we suggest that during the medieval period, de-forms are reanalysed as nouns, which causes wide-ranging changes in their distribution, including the development of complex prepositions such as au-dessus de.Item Open Access Syllable structure and prosodic words in Early Old French(2020) Rainsford, ThomasThis paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the phonotactics of syllable rhymes based on all unique tokens in two Early Old French texts. Based on the data from this single, conservative variety, I develop Jacobs’ (1994) proposal that the Old French stress rule is underlyingly trochaic and that word- inal stress is caused by the presence of an empty-headed final syllable. I argue that this analysis can only be valid while words with final stress systematically end in a consonant that can, and often must, be parsed as the onset to an empty-headed syllable. Although this is not the case in most later varieties of Old French, the prediction is borne out by our data. I conclude by examining the implications of this analysis for the accentuation and phonotactics of monosyllables and for the study of prosodic change in Old French.