The Evolution of Complex Text Patterns:Development and Application of a corpus-linguistic Approach for Analysis of Diachronic Change of Text Patterns in its Multidimensionality

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The project proposed here targets the identification of suitable indicators for diachronic change of text patterns based on two highly relevant genres in recent language history (newspapers and devotional literature). Despite its considerable importance for the history of language, diachronic change of text patterns has thus far only been examined with respect to very small text samples, particularly for the text types under consideration here. Therefore, in the course of preliminary work we developed a model for the description of diachronic change of text patterns, which we now propose to systematically test, adapt, and further develop in a corpus-based approach.This underlying multi-dimensional model draws on existing research results regarding linguistic indicators (prefered grammatical structures etc.) for the characterisation of text types. These specific indicators are to be verified with respect to a large text basis in the course of the proposed project. In doing so, the proposed model will be operationalised in such a way that automatic and manual text analysis as well as quantitative and qualitative examination intertwine and mutually inform one another.Concretely, we propose here to systematically investigate patterns of the structural, functional, social, and stylistic dimensions of texts. Since patterns associated with these dimensions can partly be acquired from the textual surface, we can draw on the results of conventional computational linguistic analysis tools. In addition, we plan to apply manual annotation wherever features cannot yet be reliably extracted with automatic methods (especially for historical texts). The extracted features will undergo statistical analysis and the results of this quantitative method will then be verified and interpreted in a qualitative approach based on the actual text sources. Conversely, the manual annotations being results of qualitative analyses will be exploited with quantitative methods.The work will be based on newspapers on the one hand, and devotional literature on the other hand, thus including two genres which had a firmly established place in everyday life for a wide range of recipients in their time. The variety of the corpora under consideration is expected to lead to far-reaching results regarding the manifestations of diachronic change of text patterns in general, thus ensuring the applicability of the techniques developed in the course of the project to the analysis of further text types.