Corpus Of Historical Texts Research Articles

Evolution of the Moral Lexicon.

Morality is central to social well-being and cognition, and moral lexicon is a key device for human communication of moral concepts and experiences. How was the moral lexicon formed? We explore this open question and hypothesize that words evolved to take on abstract moral meanings from concrete and grounded experiences. We test this hypothesis by analyzing semantic change and formation of over 800 words from the English Moral Foundations Dictionary and the Historical Thesaurus of English over the past hundreds of years. Across historical text corpora and dictionaries, we discover concrete-to-abstract shifts as words acquire moral meaning, in contrast with the broad observation that words become more concrete over time. Furthermore, we find that compound moral words tend to be derived from a concrete-to-abstract shift from their constituents, and this derivational property is more prominent in moral words compared to alternative compound words when word frequency is controlled for. We suggest that evolution of the moral lexicon depends on systematic metaphorical mappings from concrete domains to the moral domain. Our results provide large-scale evidence for the role of metaphor in shaping the historical development of the English moral lexicon.

Wybory translatorskie XIX-wiecznego słownikarza rosyjskiego jako impuls do badań chronologizacyjnych polskiej leksyki zapożyczonej

Fifty-one entries (with the letter M) in the Russian-Polish dictionary of 1877 which were assigned a discussion of the meaning instead of a real translation, e.g. муссон – wjatr periodyczny [a periodic wind], were examined. These were limited to borrowed Russian units which today correspond to Polish borrowed units, e.g. муссон – monsun [monsoon]. The Polish words are the object of the analysis. In order to discover the reason for their omission from the dictionary, evidence of their use in the corpus of historical texts was sought. It was found that 80% of the borrowings (41 units) occurred in texts before 1876, but some of them were not recorded in the dictionaries of the time and perhaps that is why they did not find their way into the translation dictionary. 20% of the material (10 units) is lexis that entered circulation after the dictionary was published.

Estimating child linguistic experience from historical corpora

Child language acquisition is often identified as one of the primary drivers of language change, but the lack of historical child data presents a challenge for empirically investigating its effect. In this work, I observe the relationship between lexicons extracted from modern child-directed speech and those drawn from modern and historical literary corpora in order to better understand when language acquisition can be modeled over historical and non-child corpora as it is over child corpora. The type frequencies of morphophonological and syntactic-semantic patterns occur at similar type frequencies in these corpora among high token frequency items, and furthermore, when a learning algorithm is applied to lexicons sampled from these sources, it consistently achieves the same learning outcomes in each. With appropriate care and pre-processing, modern and historical text corpora are effectively interchangeable with child-directed speech corpora for the purpose of estimating child lexical experience, opening a path for modeling language acquisition where child-directed corpora are not available.

Spelling variation in historical text corpora: The case of early medieval documentary Latin

Spelling variation in historical text corpora: The case of early medieval documentary Latin

From Romani to Iberian Para-Romani varieties by Zuzana Krinková (review)

From to Iberian Para-Romani varieties. Zuzana Krinkova. Prague: Karolinum. 2015. pp. 271. ISBN 978-80-246-2936-9, ISSN 978-80-246-2936-0 (pdf).Reviewed by Kimmo GranqvistPara-Romani varieties - the term is usually attributed to Cortiade (1991) - are mixed-language varieties whose lexicon is based on Romani, but which use the morpho-syntactic frame of surrounding (majority) languages. Zuzana Krinkova's monograph on the Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Brazilian (Para-) varieties offers a new contribution to the line of research on such language forms. The Iberian Para-Romani varieties, in particular Spanish Calo, have been been the subject of recent research by Adiego Ignasi-Xavier (e.g. 1998, 2002, 2012, 2013). Matras's (2010) book discusses British Angloromani, while Carling, Lindell and Ambrazaitis (2014) discuss Swedish Scandoromani. At the University of Helsinki, a PhD thesis is currently being prepared on contact varieties of and Finnish.Krinkova's book is divided into four main chapters, of which the first is a general introduction to and Para-Romani varieties (pp. 13-25). The two subsequent chapters discuss the history, classification and status (pp. 27-40) and sources (pp. 41-53) of Iberian Romani. The linguistic description of Iberian Para-Romani varieties itself constitutes a single lengthy chapter (pp. 55-172), comprising phonological and morpho-syntactic analyses and describing the vocabulary. These main chapters are followed by a conclusion, references, an abstract, an index and an etymological appendix. The sociolinguistic discussion (pp. 38-40) could have been more elaborate. It also fails to pay attention to the sociolinguistic situation of Brazilian Para-RomaniIn my view, one of the biggest problems of this book is the data focus on a time span of several centuries and the reliance on many different kinds of sources which are incoherent in many ways in regard to their quality, accuracy, comprehensiveness and overall scope. This problem is typical of most surveys that are based on historical text corpora. The book is based exclusively on written sources. In the case of Calo (pp. 44-52) these are mainly glossaries and dictionaries, and to a lesser extent text corpora and previous grammatical descriptions, the oldest dating back to 1573 and the newest from the twentyfirst century. Much less data is available for the other Iberian (Para-)Romani varieties which Krinkova discusses. It is a pity that the author did not carry out her own fieldwork to collect additional data on contemporary Iberian ParaKimmo varieties (though she flags this as a future task). Fieldwork would be particularly interesting when it comes to the Basque and Catalan Para-Romani varieties, which are extinct, but for which remnants can still found (p. 40).The phonological analysis (pp. 56-107) is extensive, detailed and fairly comprehensive. It begins with a look at the different orthographies of Iberian (Para-)Romani varieties. Orthographic practices are particularly intriguing in the case of uncodified languages such as most dialects, and when dealing with data from different periods of time. The analysis covers most areas of segmental phonology (vowel and consonant systems; phonotactics; phonological processes of adding or deleting segments, some sound changes). Much emphasis is placed on the one hand on conservative Romani-specific features such as aspiration of voiceless stops and the rhotics /r/ and /r/, the representation of the Early cluster /ndr/, as well as on some innovations that are shared with other modern dialects, such as palatalization phenomena. Attention is also given to changes induced by contact with the respective languages of the Iberian Peninsula. Krinkova's claim that nasalization does not exist in Romani (p. 94) is in not entirely accurate, as underlying geminate voiced stops are regularly substitutes for sequences of a homorganic nasal and a voiced stops in Finnish Romani, e. …

A corpus-based account of the development of English such and Dutch zulk: Identification, intensification and (inter)subjectification

Abstract On the basis of synchronic English language material, Bolinger (Degree Words, Mouton, 1972) has put forward the hypothesis that intensifying meanings or “degree words” often develop from identifying expressions. This paper will empirically test Bolinger's hypothesis by means of in-depth diachronic study of the development of such—one of Bolinger's central examples—and of its Dutch cognate zulk in historical text corpora. To this aim, a detailed cognitive-functional account will first be provided of the (differences between the) identifying and intensifying uses of such and zulk, with attention for diachronic changes affecting the syntax and semantics of these uses, cross-linguistically as well as language-specifically. It will be shown that, as predicted by Bolinger (Degree Words, Mouton, 1972), the proportion of identifying uses decreases over time in favor of the intensifying uses both in English and Dutch. The comparison between such and zulk will, however, show that, despite the close relation between these two languages, the development does not run strictly parallel in English and Dutch, thus endorsing a view that language change does not necessarily follow predetermined pathways. We will argue that minute differences in the syntax of such and zulk steer the diachronic course these elements follow. Finally, Bolinger's shift from identification to intensification will be discussed in terms of its relation to existing (inter)subjectification hypotheses.