Diachronic treebanks allow for a new approach to diachronic studies of syntactic phenomena. These papers report research on various diachronic matters supported such by evidence, covering a wide ...range of languages, including English, French, Russian, Latin and Ancient Greek. Originally published as Diachronica 35:3 (2018).
This book is a detailed study of the possessive semantic space within the framework of construction grammar. Using corpus data from Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian, the book uses semantic maps to ...document the relationship between form and meaning in a set of semantically closely related adnominal possessive constructions, and to trace their diachronic development. Hanne Martine Eckhoff, University of Oslo, Norway.
This book is a detailed study of the possessive semantic space within the framework of construction grammar. Using corpus data from Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian, the book uses semantic maps to ...document the relationship between form and meaning in a set of semantically closely related syntactic constructions that can all express adnominal possession and all partially overlap. The book also traces the development of these constructions from the earliest Slavic attestations towards Modern Russian, thus also using the semantic maps as a diachronic tool. This approach results in a much improved analysis of the data at hand: The competing possessive constructions are treated as partly synonymous constructions in the same semantic space. Changes are then seen to follow paths in this space. The constructionist perspective also allows discerning the relative contributions of the possessor nominal, the possessee nominal and properties of the constructions themselves. The book is a contribution to Slavic historical linguistics, to the general understanding of adnominal possession and to forwarding functionalist approaches to syntactic change.
Historical languages are increasingly being modelled computationally. Syntactically annotated texts are often a sine-qua-non in their modelling, but parsing of pre-modern language varieties faces ...great data sparsity, intensified by high levels of orthographic variation. In this paper we present a good-quality Early Slavic dependency parser, attained via manipulation of modern Slavic data to resemble the orthography and morphosyntax of pre-modern varieties. The tool can be deployed to expand historical treebanks, which are crucial for data collection and quantification, and beneficial to downstream NLP tasks and historical text mining.
•Bi-LSTM PoS tagger and dependency parser for Early Slavic.•Developed to build historical treebanks, crucial for quantitative linguistics and NLP.•Variety-agnostic.•Scalable: modern data of any genre can be harmonized to Early Slavic using the integrated scripts.
Abstract
This paper illustrates how enriched diachronic treebank data can shed new light on an old and vexed topic, even when that topic is
primarily morphological and semantic in nature rather than ...syntactic. The topic is the rise of the Russian
po
delimitatives, a change seen as crucial in most accounts of the history of Russian aspect, since it represents a major step in
generalising the derivational aspect system. Earlier accounts concur that the
po
delimitatives spread fairly
recently, too recently for the development to be connected to the loss of the aorist tense, which also had delimitative readings
with atelic verbs. Using treebank data from the Tromsø Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic Treebank, enriched with tags for
derivational morphology and semantics, I show that the
po
delimitatives were not marginal even in the earliest
Slavic sources, either in terms of frequency or semantics, and that they first complemented and then competed with the
delimitative aorists. It can thus be claimed that the exotic
po
delimitatives grew organically out of the old
Indo-European inflectional aspect system.
This article explores the synchronic variation between the nominative-accusative (NA) and genitive-accusative (GA) in the oldest layer of canonical Old Church Slavonic (OCS), using parallel Greek and ...OCS data with principled information status annotation. Firstly, the data are used to clarify the claims made about the pragmatic properties of the alternation in the previous literature. There is a good case for claiming that OCS GA marking functions as a limited type of definiteness marking, i.e. that GA objects will nearly always be previously mentioned or contextually accessible. Secondly, the data are used to examine whether the GA–NA variation correlates with any other discourse properties known to be important in differential object marking systems. The NA is found to be a marker of referential persistence: a new referent will typically be NA-marked if it is an important participant in the further narrative. Third, the focus is shifted to the relationship between subject and object properties. There are indications that the GA is preferred even with new object referents if the subject has low prominence. Thus, the variation is best understood as a situation of differential object marking conditioned by several discourse properties: definiteness, referential persistence and perhaps subject-object asymmetry.
This article explores the synchronic variation between the nominative-accusative (NA) and genitive-accusative (GA) in the oldest layer of canonical Old Church Slavonic (OCS), using parallel Greek and ...OCS data with principled information status annotation. Firstly, the data are used to clarify the claims made about the pragmatic properties of the alternation in the previous literature. There is a good case for claiming that OCS GA marking functions as a limited type of definiteness marking, i.e. that GA objects will nearly always be previously mentioned or contextually accessible. Secondly, the data are used to examine whether the GA-NA variation correlates with any other discourse properties known to be important in differential object marking systems. The NA is found to be a marker of referential persistence: a new referent will typically be NA-marked if it is an important participant in the further narrative. Third, the focus is shifted to the relationship between subject and object properties. There are indications that the GA is preferred even with new object referents if the subject has low prominence. Thus, the variation is best understood as a situation of differential object marking conditioned by several discourse properties: definiteness, referential persistence and perhaps subject-object asymmetry. В статье исследуется синхронная вариативность в употреблении форм винительно-родительного (ВИН-РОД) и винительно-именительного (ВИН-ИМ) падежей в древнейших текстах старославянского канона. Анализ опирается на параллельный корпус старославянских и греческих текстов, размеченный в том числе на уровне информационной структуры предложения. Вначале рассматриваются существующие гипотезы о прагматических свойствах вариативности ВИН-РОД/ВИН-ИМ в свете корпусных данных. Есть основания утверждать, что ВИН-РОД в старославян-ском функционирует как подобие маркера определенности, т.е. если прямой объект стоит в форме ВИН-РОД, то почти всегда он либо употреблялся раньше, либо доступен из контекста. Затем проверяется, коррелирует ли вариативность ВИН-РОД/ВИН-ИМ с какими-либо другими дискурсивными параметрами, релевантными для дифференцированного маркирования объекта. Выясняется, что ВИН-ИМ служит маркером значимости для дальнейшего повествования. Наконец, рассматривается взаимосвязь свойств субъекта и объекта. Есть некоторые указания на то, что если выделенность субъекта в дискурсе невысока, то для объекта будет предпочтительна форма ВИН-РОД, даже если референт является новым. Таким образом, вариативность ВИН-РОД/ВИН-ИМ следует описывать как случай дифференцированного маркирования объекта, в котором выбор формы обуславливается рядом дискурсивных параметров: определенностью, значимостью референта для дальнейшего повествования, и, возможно, асимметрией субъекта и объекта.
In this article we focus on one grammaticalization path to perfective markers, that of the so-called ‘bounder perfectives’ (Bybee & Dahl 1989). Systems with these kinds of perfective markers – often ...called ‘Slavic-style aspect’ – are particularly elaborated in the Slavic languages. To examine why this is the case, we study the long-disputed question of the semantic relationship between the inflectional aspectual system inherited from PIE and the emerging affixation-based verb pair system in expressing aspect in Old Church Slavonic (OCS), using parallel Greek and OCS data from the PROIEL corpus. Previous researchers have made extremely conflicting claims about this relationship, some seeing the inflectional system as the main exponent of aspect, others seeing the affixation system as the main exponent of aspect. Our statistical study of the data shows rather that the OCS system attests an interesting language stage where there are two partially overlapping exponents of aspect. By firmly establishing the facts of the synchronic OCS system, we can look both backwards and forwards. We argue that Slavic ‘bounder perfectives’ owe their advanced development to their coexistence with the old inflectional aspect system. We also argue that the well-known interactions between the two aspectual systems in Bulgarian, which still retains both, are probably a later development.
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