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A quantitative and typological study of Early Slavic participle clauses and their competition

Authors :
Pedrazzini, Nilo
Publication Year :
2024

Abstract

This thesis is a corpus-based, quantitative, and typological analysis of the functions of Early Slavic participle constructions and their finite competitors ($jegda$-'when'-clauses). The first part leverages detailed linguistic annotation on Early Slavic corpora at the morphosyntactic, dependency, information-structural, and lexical levels to obtain indirect evidence for different potential functions of participle clauses and their main finite competitor and understand the roles of compositionality and default discourse reasoning as explanations for the distribution of participle constructions and $jegda$-clauses in the corpus. The second part uses massively parallel data to analyze typological variation in how languages express the semantic space of English $when$, whose scope encompasses that of Early Slavic participle constructions and $jegda$-clauses. Probabilistic semantic maps are generated and statistical methods (including Kriging, Gaussian Mixture Modelling, precision and recall analysis) are used to induce cross-linguistically salient dimensions from the parallel corpus and to study conceptual variation within the semantic space of the hypothetical concept WHEN.<br />Comment: 259 pages, 138 figures. DPhil Thesis in Linguistics submitted and defended at the University of Oxford (December 2023). This manuscript is a version formatted for improved readability and broader dissemination

Details

Database :
arXiv
Publication Type :
Report
Accession number :
edsarx.2405.01972
Document Type :
Working Paper
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.5287/ora-8gv0b4qyo