Darling, dukeling, duckling: how historical corpora can verify predicted pathways of language change
Duration: 25 mins 14 secs
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| Description: | Talk by Dr Marieke Meelen, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Theoretical & Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge |
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| Created: | 2019-11-25 14:36 | ||||
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| Collection: | Cambridge Language Sciences | ||||
| Publisher: | University of Cambridge | ||||
| Copyright: | Dr Marieke Meelen | ||||
| Language: | eng (English) | ||||
| Distribution: |
World
(downloadable)
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| Keywords: | historical linguistics; language variation and change; corpus linguistics; low-resource languages; data mining; | ||||
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| Categories: |
iTunes - Language - Linguistics iTunes - Language |
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| Explicit content: | No | ||||
| Aspect Ratio: | 4:3 | ||||
| Screencast: | No | ||||
| Bumper: | UCS Default | ||||
| Trailer: | UCS Default | ||||
| Abstract: | Over the years, scholars in formal semantic and morpho-syntactic frameworks have observed a number of ‘universal tendencies’ in language change. Jurafsky’s (1996) study of diminutives, for example, aims to predict the cross-linguistic origin and developments of words and suffixes that are linked to children such as ‘-ling’ in ‘duck-ling’, a baby duck. Recent work in comparative syntax goes one step further attempting to explain how cross-linguistic constraints on word-order variation are manifested and why that might lead to certain changes. These observations, however, are often based on a limited number of examples. In order to trace the exact history of predicted changes and verify postulated mechanisms of change, it is important to dive deeper and more rigorously into a large amount of historical data. In this talk I demonstrate why it is essential to build good historical corpora and how state-of-the-art methods of data mining can not only reveal a wealth of previously unknown linguistic features, they can also check predictions regarding cross-linguistic differences and similarities in semantics, morphology and syntax. |
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