Παρουσίαση/Προβολή

(ENL500) -  Νικόλαος Λαβίδας

Περιγραφή Μαθήματος

 

Mondays,   at 9:15

Room 824

 

This course examines the construction and use of corpora as valuable tools in the study of linguistic diachrony. The aim of the course is to introduce students to the study of language change through the use of diachronic corpora. In the first part of the course, we examine whether particular linguistic theories can succeed in analyzing language change. We emphasize the importance of data-driven research and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both the model of Grammaticalization and the Principles and Parameters model. The main part of the course explores how quantitative methods applied to diachronic corpora can be used to model the time course of language change. Historical linguistics is by definition strongly related to corpora: the texts of a historical period form a corpus of data, and we can base historical linguistic research only on texts. Diachronic corpora are textual resources that represent several periods of time. The rise of interest in diachronic corpus linguistics over the past few decades has resulted in an unprecedented number of corpora of various types that have facilitated the study of language change. For example, resources such as the helsinki, brown, and archer corpora have revealed the details of several aspects of the diachronic development of English. We will focus on diachronic treebanks, that is, on diachronic corpora with morpho-syntactic annotation and the examples of the PROIEL-family of treebanks and the Penn-parsed corpora (other treebanks for historical linguists include The Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency Treebank, The Index Thomisticus Treebank, The Corpus of Historical Low German, The Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus, and The Parsed Old and Middle Irish Corpus). An annotated diachronic corpus is the result of several decisions that should be informed by linguistic theory. These decisions concern the annotation scheme, tools for annotation, ease of use, and preservation of the electronic corpus. The course provides an opportunity to gain practical experience in using electronic corpora and analyzing diachronic data.

Ημερομηνία δημιουργίας

Δευτέρα 10 Φεβρουαρίου 2020