Morphosyntactic Variation in Medieval Celtic Languages: Corpus-Based Approaches

Description

This book showcases the state of the art in the corpus-based linguistics of medieval Celtic languages. Its chapters detail theoretical advances in analysing variation/change in the Celtic languages and computational tools necessary to process/analyse the data. Many contributions situate the Celtic material in the broader field of corpus-based diachronic linguistics. The application of computational methods to Celtic languages is in its infancy and this book is a first in medieval Celtic Studies, which has mainly concentrated on philological endeavours such as editorial and literary work. The Celtic languages represent a new frontier in the development of NLP tools because they pose special challenges, like complicated inflectional morphology with non-straightforward mappings between lemmata and attested forms, irregular orthography, and consonant mutations. With so much data available in non-electronic form and ongoing efforts to convert these data to computer-readable format, there is much room for the developing/testing of new tools. This books provides an overview of this process at a crucial time in the development of the field and aims to the data accessible to computational linguists with an interest in diachronic change. Contents List of contributors Overview of linguistic annotation Introduction: Celtic Studies and Corpus Linguistics Part 1: Corpus tools for historical Celtic linguistics 1 Treebanks for historical languages and scalability 2 Annotating Middle Welsh: POS tagging and chunk-parsing a corpus of native prose 3 Automatic morphological analysis and interlinking of historical Irish cognate verb forms 4 Text clustering and methods in the Book of Leinster Part 2: Morphosyntactic variation and change in medieval Celtic languages 5 The demonstrative pronouns in Old and Middle Irish 6 Paradigmatic split and merger: The descriptive and diachronic problem of Old Irish Class B infixed pronouns 7 Nasalisation after inflected nominals in the Old Irish glosses: Evidence for variation and change 8 On the obligatory use of a nasalising relative clause after an adjectival antecedent in the Old Irish glosses 9 The “Cowgill particle”, preverbal ceta ‘first’, and prepositional cleft sentences in the Old Irish glosses 10 The functions and semantics of Middle Welsh X hun(an): A quantitative study 11 Prolegomena to the diachrony of Cornish syntax References Index