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Word Families in Diachrony. An epoch-spanning structure for the word families of older German
(2022)
The ‘Word Families in Diachrony’ project (WoDia), for which a funding application to the DFG is in preparation, aims to provide a database driven online research environment that will enable processes of change in the entire historical vocabulary of German to be investigated by focusing on the changes in word families and the individual means of word formation. WoDia will embed the vocabularies of Old High German (OHG), Middle High German (MHG), Old Saxon (OS), and Middle Low German (MLG) in a database, resulting in a word-family structure for High and Low German from the beginnings up to the 15th century (for High German) and up to the 17th century (for Low German). The basis of the vocabulary is provided by reference dictionaries of the four historical varieties, whereas the word families’ historical structure is based on the word-family dictionary of OHG by Jochen Splett (1992). Each lemma in the database will be assigned, where appropriate, to a word family. The individual word-formation elements and the word-formation hierarchy will be mapped in a structural formula. The etymologically corresponding lemmas and word families of the different periods/varieties of older German will be linked so that an analysis across the varieties will also be possible. The annotations of word families in the database (e. g., relating to word structure) will be supplemented by linking their lemmas to the online dictionaries and to the reference corpora of Old German (OS and OHG), MHG, and MLG.
Present-day German uses two formally different patterns of compounding in N+N compounds. The first combines bare stems (e.g. Tisch+decke ‘tablecloth’) while the second contains an intervening linking element (LE) as in Geburt-s-ort ‘birth-LE-place’. The linked compounding type developed in Early New High German (1350–1650) from phrasal constructions by reanalyzing genitive attributes as first constituents of compounds. The present paper uses corpus data to explore three key stages in this development: In the initial stage, it shows how prenominal non-specific genitive constructions lent themselves to reanalysis due to their functional overlap and formal similarity. Additionally, compounds seem to have replaced not only prenominal genitives, but also structurally different postnominal genitives. In the second stage, the new compounding pattern increases in productivity between 1500 and 1710, especially compared to the older pattern without linking elements. The last stage pertains to changes in spelling practice. It shows that linked compounds were written separately in the beginning. Their gradual graphematic integration into directly connected words was reversed by a century of hyphenation (1650–1750). This is strikingly different from present-day spelling practice and shows that the linked pattern was still perceived as marked.
This paper studies the morphological productivity of German N+N compounding patterns from a diachronic perspective. It argues that the productivity of compounds increases due to syntactic influence from genitive constructions (“improper compounds”) in Early New High German. Both quantitative and qualitative productivity measures are adapted from derivational morphology and tested on compound data from the Mainz Corpus of (Early) New High German (1500–1710).
In this paper, an exploratory data-driven method is presented that extracts word-types from diachronic corpora that have undergone the most pronounced change in frequency of occurrence in a given period of time. Combined with statistical methods from time series analysis, the method is able to find meaningful patterns and relationships in diachronic corpora, an idea that is still uncommon in linguistics. This indicates that the approach can facilitate an improved understanding of diachronic processes.
This thesis consists of the following three papers that all have been published in international peer-reviewed journals:
Chapter 3: Koplenig, Alexander (2015c). The Impact of Lacking Metadata for the Measurement of Cultural and Linguistic Change Using the Google Ngram Data Sets—Reconstructing the Composition of the German Corpus in Times of WWII. Published in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [doi:10.1093/llc/fqv037]
Chapter 4: Koplenig, Alexander (2015b). Why the quantitative analysis of dia-chronic corpora that does not consider the temporal aspect of time-series can lead to wrong conclusions. Published in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [doi:10.1093/llc/fqv030]
Chapter 5: Koplenig, Alexander (2015a). Using the parameters of the Zipf–Mandelbrot law to measure diachronic lexical, syntactical and stylistic changes – a large-scale corpus analysis. Published in: Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. [doi:10.1515/cllt-2014-0049]
Chapter 1 introduces the topic by describing and discussing several basic concepts relevant to the statistical analysis of corpus linguistic data. Chapter 2 presents a method to analyze diachronic corpus data and a summary of the three publications. Chapters 3 to 5 each represent one of the three publications. All papers are printed in this thesis with the permission of the publishers.
In this paper, a method for measuring synchronic corpus (dis-)similarity put forward by Kilgarriff (2001) is adapted and extended to identify trends and correlated changes in diachronic text data, using the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies 2010a) and the Google Ngram Corpora (Michel et al. 2010a). This paper shows that this fully data-driven method, which extracts word types that have undergone the most pronounced change in frequency in a given period of time, is computationally very cheap and that it allows interpretations of diachronic trends that are both intuitively plausible and motivated from the perspective of information theory. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the method is able to identify correlated linguistic changes and diachronic shifts that can be linked to historical events. Finally, it can help to improve diachronic POS tagging and complement existing NLP approaches. This indicates that the approach can facilitate an improved understanding of diachronic processes in language change.
One of the specific historical and cultural characteristics of the Russian political discourse is its orientation to precedents. It is considered correct to follow the behaviouristic models shown by one of the “heroes” (Peter I, Lenin, Stalin, etc.), to reproduce standard texts, and to compare the present situations with past situations (The Time of Troubles, Weimar Republic, NEP “New Economic Policy” (1921-1928), etc.). One of the peculiarities of the present time in Russia is the deep conflict between different social groups orientated to different precedents. Each group has its own variant of the national myth using the same means of the language for actualisation of this myth. Therefore, it is very important to analyse changes in the national cognitive foundation. Precedential phenomena are the central components of this foundation.
The paper reports on a dictionary of German loanwords in the languages of the South Pacific that is compiled at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. The loanwords described in this dictionary mainly result from language contact between 1884 and 1914, when the German empire was in possession of large areas of the South Pacific where overall more than 700 indigenous languages were spoken. The dictionary is designed as an electronic XML-based resource from which an internet dictionary and a printed dictionary can be derived. Its printed version is intended as an ‘inverted loanword dictionary’, that is, a dictionary that – in contrast to the usual praxis in loanword lexicography – lemmatizes the words of a source language that have been borrowed by other languages. Each of the loanwords will be described with respect to its form and meaning and the contact situation in which it was borrowed. Among the outer texts of the dictionary are (i) a list of all sources with bibliographic and archival information, (ii) a commentary on each source, (iii) a short history of the language contact with German for each target language, and perhaps (iv) facsimiles of source texts.The dictionary is supposed to (i) help to reconstruct the history of language contact of the source language, (ii) provide evidence for the cultural contact between the populations speaking the source and the target languages, (iii) enable linguistic theories about the systematic changes of the semantic, morphosyntactic, or phonological lexical properties of the source language when its words are borrowed into genetically and typologically different languages, and (iv) establish a thoroughly described case for testing typological theories of borrowing.