In:Perspectives on Historical Syntax
Edited by Carlotta Viti
[Studies in Language Companion Series 169] 2015
► pp. 187–202
Treebanks in historical linguistic research
Published online: 29 April 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.169.07hau
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.169.07hau
In this methodological article I discuss the advantages of using parsed corpora (treebanks) for historical linguistics research. I argue that even apparently simple, descriptive questions such as how often different word orders occur cannot be adequately answered without the use of treebanks, which make the underlying theoretical assumptions explicit. I demonstrate this concretely with a case study from word order in participle clauses in the New Testament.
Keywords: corpora, syntax, treebanks, word order
References (25)
Aland, Kurt, Matthew Black, Bruce Metzger and Allen Wikgren, Greek New Testament, 3rd edition. Stuttgart: United Bible Societies.
Citko, Barbara. 2011. Multidominance. In The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism, Cedric Boeckx (ed.), 119–142, Oxford: OUP.
Dik, Helma. 1995. Word Order in Ancient Greek. A Pragmatic Account of Word Order in Herodotus. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben.
Friberg, Barbara & Friberg, Timothy. 1981. Analytical Greek New Testament. Grand Rapids MI: Baker Book House.
Hale, Ken. 1983. Warlpiri and the grammar of non-configurational languages. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 1(1): 5–47.
Happ, Heinz. 1976. Grundfragen einer Dependenzgrammatik des Lateinischen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Haug, Dag, Eckhoff, Hanne & Welo, Eirik. 2014. The theoretical foundations of givenness annotation. In Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 213], Kristin Bech & Kristine Eide (eds), 17-52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Haug, Dag & Jøhndal, Marius L. 2008. Creating a parallel treebank of the old Indo-European bible translations. In Language Resources and Evaluation, Marrakech, Morocco.
Haug, Dag, Jøhndal, Marius L., Eckhoff, Hanne, Welo, Eirik, Hertzenberg, Mari & Müth, Angelika. 2009. Computational and linguistic issues in designing a syntactically annotated parallel corpus of Indo-European languages. Traitement Automatique des Langues 50: 17–45.
Kaplan, Ronald M. & Bresnan, Joan. 1982. Lexical-Functional Grammar: A formal system for grammatical representation. In The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, Joan Bresnan (ed.), 173–281, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Kirk, Allison. 2012. Word Order and Information Structure in New Testament Greek. PhD dissertation, Universiteit Leiden.
Matić, Dejan. 2003. Topic, focus, and discourse structure. Studies in Language 27: 573–633.
Niyogi, Partha. 2002. The computational study of diachronic linguistics. In Syntactic Effects of Morphological Change, David Lightfoot (ed.), 351– 365. Oxford: OUP.
Pereira, Fernando. 2000. Formal grammar and information theory: Together again? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 358: 1239–1253.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Sokolov, E. G.
Cathcart, Chundra, Gerd Carling, Filip Larsson, Niklas Johansson & Erich Round
Eckhoff, Hanne Martine, Silvia Luraghi & Marco Passarotti
2018. The added value of diachronic treebanks for historical linguistics. Diachronica 35:3 ► pp. 297 ff.
Eckhoff, Hanne Martine, Silvia Luraghi & Marco Passarotti
2020. The added value of diachronic treebanks for historical linguistics. In Diachronic Treebanks for Historical Linguistics [Benjamins Current Topics, 113], ► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
