LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE: Old & Middle English - Old High German - Old Norse - Old Romance - Ancient Greek

Saturday, August 3, 2019

Dag Haug

(University of Oslo)

Ancient Greek and Corpus Linguistics

In this talk I show how the use of corpora, and in particular of corpora with syntactic annotation, can be useful for Greek linguistics. The case study will be based on the empirical part of my paper "Backward control in Ancient Greek and Latin participial adjuncts" (NLLT 25, 2017). I will show how we can test hypotheses by exploring how their predictions fare in annotated data and draw an important lesson about the annotation design for ancient languages where we lack detailed knowledge of the syntax: we should never try to extend the sophistication of our annotation schemes beyond what can generally as secure knowledge or we may lose sight of unexpected but very interesting phenomena such as for example backward control.