"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)"--.

• Diachronic Treebanks for Historical Linguistics
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Introduction: The added value of diachronic treebanks for historical linguisticsThe added value of diachronic treebanks for historical linguistics
  • 1. Ancient languages and digital sources
  • 2. What is a treebank?
  • 3. Historical corpora and treebanks
  • 4. Historical treebanks in use
  • 5. Aims and scope of this volume
    • 5.1 Old topics, new methods
    • 5.2 Treebanks, text attestations and methodology
  • 6. Conclusions
  • References
• Split coordination in English: Why we need parsed corpora
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The case study
    • 2.1 Extracting the data
    • 2.2 The distribution of split subject coordination over time
    • 2.3 A comparison of PDE with earlier stages of the language
    • 2.4 Factors favouring the splitting of conjuncts
  • 3. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix 1. Corpora
    • The English Historical Parsed Corpora Series
  • Appendix 2. Search and coding queries
    • A. Query files for the PPHE corpora
      • A.1 Extract all coordinated subjects in finite clauses
      • A.2 Separate split and non-split subjects
      • A.3 Code split coordinated subjects as split, and for the position of the 2nd conjunct (final/non-final), as illustrated in (11) for Table 3
      • A.3 Code split coordinated subjects as split, and for the position of the 2nd conjunct (final/non-final), as illustrated in (11) for Table 3
      • A.4 Code non-split coordinations as non.split and for type (needed for coding length; cf. A.5 below)
      • A.5 Code for length of conjuncts
    • B. Queries for Penn Treebank corpora (Brown, CallHome, Switchboard, Wall Street Journal)
      • B.1 Split subject coordinations
• A corpus approach to the history of Russian po delimitatives: A corpus approach to the history of Russian po delimitatives
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Previous approaches
  • 3. Data and method
  • 4. The semantic development of the po prefix
  • 5. Aorists vs. po: Verb classes across time
    • 5.1 OCS
    • 5.2 Old East Slavic
    • 5.3 Middle Russian
  • 6. Delimitative contexts in Old East Slavic
  • 7. Conclusions
  • References
  • Appendix
• Non-configurationality in diachrony: Correlations in local and global networks of Ancient Greek and LatinCorrelations in local and global networks of Ancient Greek and Latin
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Non-configurationality
    • 2.1 Word order
    • 2.2 Discontinuous NPs
    • 2.3 Definite referential null objects
  • 3. Methodology
    • 3.1 The corpus
    • 3.2 Network induction
  • 4. Metrics and results
    • 4.1 Free word order
    • 4.2 Discontinuous NPs
    • 4.3 Referential null objects
  • 5. Discussion
  • 6. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Text form and grammatical changes in Medieval French: Text form and grammatical changes in Medieval French: A treebank-based diachronic study
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The loss of null subjects
    • 2.1 Abstract grammar-based analysis
    • 2.2 Direct vs. narrative discourse
  • 3. OVfin decline in prose vs. verse
    • 3.1 From OV to VO: Simple estimates
    • 3.2 Abstract grammar-based analysis
      • 3.2.1 Grammar A (‘old’)
      • 3.2.2 Grammar B (‘new’)
    • 3.3 Transition from Grammar A to B
  • 4. Conclusions
  • References
  • Appendix: Head types and determiners with direct objects
• Spoken Latin behind written texts: Formulaicity and salience in medieval documentary textsFormulaicity and salience in medieval documentary texts
  • 1. Introduction and objectives
  • 2. Data
  • 3. Formulaicity
  • 4. Theoretical background and research setting
  • 5. Linguistic features
  • 6. Results and their interpretation
    • 6.1 Formulaicity and salience
    • 6.2 Analysis of the morphological and syntactic features
  • 7. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Word index
• Index of languages
• Index of authors