Search

This paper explores the hypothesis of contact-induced change for the rise of the partitive case in Finnic languages and of the partitive case/determiner in Basque. On the basis of the well-established Indo-European partitive-genitive case and taking into account the lack of such a basis on the Uralic side, we argue that the partitive case in Finnic languages has arisen as a result of Balto-Slavic influence. Concerning the Basque partitive determiner, we likewise suggest a contact scenario (with Romance languages) as being responsible for the development of an entire system of determiners, including the definite and possibly the indefinite article as well as the partitive marker, which originates in an old ablative ending but crucially lacks the morphological properties characteristic of Basque inflectional markers.

Over the last few decades, the widespread diffusion of digital technology has increased availability of primary textual sources, radically changing the everyday life of scholars in the humanities, who are now able to access, query and process a wealth of empirical evidence in ways not possible before. Also for ancient languages, corpora enhanced with increasingly complex layers of metalinguistic information, such as part-of-speech tagging and syntactic annotation (called ‘treebanks’) are now available. In particular, diachronic treebanks, which provide data for a language across several historical stages of a given language, allow for a new approach to diachronic studies of syntactic phenomena where scholars previously had to content themselves with empirical work on a much smaller scale. This volume brings together a set of papers that report research on various diachronic matters supported by evidence from diachronic treebanks. The contents of the papers cover a wide range of languages, including English, French, Russian, Old Church Slavonic, Latin and Ancient Greek. Originally published as special issue of Diachronica 35:3 (2018).

Over the last few decades, the widespread diffusion of digital technology has increased availability of primary textual sources, radically changing the everyday life of scholars in the humanities, who are now able to access, query and process a wealth of empirical evidence in ways not possible before. Also for ancient languages, corpora enhanced with increasingly complex layers of metalinguistic information, such as part-of-speech tagging and syntactic annotation (called ‘treebanks’) are now available. In particular, diachronic treebanks, which provide data for a language across several historical stages of a given language, allow for a new approach to diachronic studies of syntactic phenomena where scholars previously had to content themselves with empirical work on a much smaller scale. This is the introduction of a volume that brings together a set of papers that report research on various diachronic matters supported by evidence from diachronic treebanks. The contents of the papers cover a wide range of languages, including English, French, Russian, Old Church Slavonic, Latin and Ancient Greek. Originally published as special issue of Diachronica 35:3 (2018).

Introduction of the special issue of Diachronica on Diachronic Treebanks.

Special Issue of «Diachronica», 35:3, 2018.