Some methodological issues in the corpus-based study of morphosyntactic variation
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Andrés Enrique-Arias
Abstract
This paper has two main objectives: to point out some of the challenges surrounding the study of morphosyntactic variation and change through historical corpora, and to present some methodological alternatives to help alleviate these problems using the specific case study of the expression of possession in Old Spanish. The study highlights some methodological issues such as the definition of the context of occurrence of morphosyntactic variables and the problem of comparability of texts in diachronic corpora. In order to showcase some methodological alternatives the paper presents the results of a study on Old Spanish possessives that uses data from a parallel corpus of medieval Bible translations and a multinomial logistic regression analysis.
Abstract
This paper has two main objectives: to point out some of the challenges surrounding the study of morphosyntactic variation and change through historical corpora, and to present some methodological alternatives to help alleviate these problems using the specific case study of the expression of possession in Old Spanish. The study highlights some methodological issues such as the definition of the context of occurrence of morphosyntactic variables and the problem of comparability of texts in diachronic corpora. In order to showcase some methodological alternatives the paper presents the results of a study on Old Spanish possessives that uses data from a parallel corpus of medieval Bible translations and a multinomial logistic regression analysis.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface and acknowledgments vii
- Using diachronic corpora to understand the connection between genre and language change 1
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Part I. Methods in diachronic corpus linguistics
- ‘From above’, ‘from below’, and regionally balanced 19
- Diachronic collocations, genre, and DiaCollo 41
- Classical and modern Arabic corpora 65
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Part II. Genre and diachronic corpora
- Scholastic genre scripts in English medical writing 1375–1800 95
- Academic writing as a locus of grammatical change 117
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Part III. Genre-based analyses of linguistic phenomena
- The importance of genre in the Greek diglossia of the 20th century 149
- “You can’t control a thing like that” 171
- Concessive conjunctions in written American English 195
- Variation of sentence length across time and genre 219
- A comparison of multi-genre and single-genre corpora in the context of contact-induced change 241
- Some methodological issues in the corpus-based study of morphosyntactic variation 261
- The interplay between genre variation and syntax in a historical Low German corpus 281
- Genre influence on word formation (change) 301
- Index 333
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface and acknowledgments vii
- Using diachronic corpora to understand the connection between genre and language change 1
-
Part I. Methods in diachronic corpus linguistics
- ‘From above’, ‘from below’, and regionally balanced 19
- Diachronic collocations, genre, and DiaCollo 41
- Classical and modern Arabic corpora 65
-
Part II. Genre and diachronic corpora
- Scholastic genre scripts in English medical writing 1375–1800 95
- Academic writing as a locus of grammatical change 117
-
Part III. Genre-based analyses of linguistic phenomena
- The importance of genre in the Greek diglossia of the 20th century 149
- “You can’t control a thing like that” 171
- Concessive conjunctions in written American English 195
- Variation of sentence length across time and genre 219
- A comparison of multi-genre and single-genre corpora in the context of contact-induced change 241
- Some methodological issues in the corpus-based study of morphosyntactic variation 261
- The interplay between genre variation and syntax in a historical Low German corpus 281
- Genre influence on word formation (change) 301
- Index 333
