Events

DiaLing presentation by Prof. Dr. Carme Silva Domínguez (University of Santiago de Compostela): "The Evolution of Possessive Pronouns: Forms and Structures from Latin to Modern Galician and Portuguese."

Abstract: This presentation offers a comparison between possessive pronouns in three varieties proceeding from LAtin: Medieval Galician-Portuguese, Modern Galician and Modern Portuguese. First of all we will explain the morphological evolution of the paradigm through the examination of the main evolutionary phenomena which allow us to contrast the ancient and modern languages. After that we will deal with the constructive changes in the possessive structures: among them, the combination with article, placement strategies and evolution beyond the noun phrase. In addition, the syntactic behavior of the possessive seems to be different in Galician and in Portuguese, although further research about non normative varieties is needed.

Lecturer: Dr. Joel Wallenberg (Newcastle University)

In the past, the fields of historical linguistics and synchronic syntax have both largely relied on qualitative data, e.g. the analysis of isolated examples, qualitative judgment data, etc. In the last few years, however, successes in variationist sociolinguistics, quantitative biology, and computer science have begun a revolution in the way both syntax and language change are studied: both fields have begun to use more quantitative data, especially in finding theoretically important statistical patterns in naturalistic production data. These fields have also combined with each other and with quantitative methods to give rise to a new field of quantitative diachronic comparative syntax. However, studying syntactic change in this mathematical way, particularly in a cross-linguistic, comparative approach, presents a number of interesting technical challenges. It requires measuring the frequencies of very abstract objects over very large periods of time, and in order to do this, we need a research infrastructure of diachronic parsed corpora (i.e. treebanks) drawn from a number of language histories. Building and analyzing these treebanks requires considerable technical skill, and a fair amount of collaboration between linguists with various computational, theoretical, and philological skills. Our workshops this week will help students with some background in syntax begin to search parsed corpora of this kind, interpret the results, and if they'd like, help them to contribute to the process of building more diachronic corpora of more languages.

Dinsdag, 25 oktober 2016, 14.00u - 16.30u, PC-lokaal D (PlaRoz): over werken met geparsede corpora, bv. PPCHE en IcePaHC

Donderdag, 27 oktober 2016, 11.00u - 13.00u, Hiko b. 001: over het bouwen van een eigen corpus, het parsen van je eigen gegevens

Deze workshops zijn een initiatief van Prof. Dr. Miriam Bouzouita en Prof. Dr. Anne Breitbarth.