A methodology for qualitative analysis of historical corpus data: New insights about language change from a micro-analytical approach

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Linguists have always been interested in finding out how language changes. This area of research was transformed in the 1980s when electronic resources with large sets of historical data (corpora) became available for study. Corpora made it possible to study language change with quantitative methods for the first time. Historical corpus linguistics has focused on the development of more and better corpora and of quantitative methods. Methods for qualitative analysis have not been adapted to exploit all possibilities offered by the new resources. The main objective of this project is to redress this balance and put qualitative research and methodology on the agenda. It will do so by- proposing new qualitative methods to identify changes in historical corpus data, - showing the descriptive gain they offer, - showing that new data found with this methodology can bear on longstanding questions in historical linguistics such as the question how language change happens.First, I will develop new methods to identify one particular type of change, that by which linguistic items acquire a new function. An example is the change of the word 'certain', which originally only occurred in combinations such as 'a certain victory', where it means "sure, guaranteed" and its function is to describe a property of the victory in question. Through language change, 'certain' developed a new function as determiner: e.g. 'certain people don't like cats' where 'certain' is equivalent to 'some'. In this change, the form 'certain' remains the same. This raises the question how we can distinguish between the two functions in historical corpus data and which empirical evidence we can adduce for this change. The new methodology will consist of types of evidence relating to the form of the item and/or the range of contexts the item occurs in (its distribution) because changes to these aspects can be observed when comparing data for different periods. Because the methods investigate individual items, they are said to operate at the micro-level (rather than at the macro-level of abstract concepts such as e.g. word classes). In a second stage, I will test how efficient the new methodology is by applying it to two new sets of data which look at English items like 'certain' which have different functions in the noun phrase (a constituent such as 'a boy', 'the happy parrot', which identifies entities). These sets involve (1) items such as 'pretty' which has an original function of ascribing a property (being good-looking), e.g. 'a pretty girl', but which also has a new function in which it intensifies another item describing a property, e.g. in 'a pretty bad week' and (2) items such as 'hard', which can ascribe a property (being solid, firm), e.g. 'a hard rock', but has developed a new function in 'a hard cheese' where it indicates a subtype of cheese (hard cheeses such as gouda as opposed to soft cheeses such as brie). I will show that the micro-analytical methods improve the description of the changes on the level of the individual items and that of the functions.The third stage of the project reconstructs how change might have happened for the items in these data sets on the basis of the new micro-analytical descriptions. One of the main questions is how the mechanisms found with the new methodology relate to the two main mechanisms of change that have been distinguished in historical linguistics: reanalysis, i.e. the syntax of a linguistic item is reinterpreted in a different way (e.g. 'hamburger' was analysed as hamburg-er, but reanalysed as ham-burger), and analogy, i.e. the extension of a form from one environment to another based on similarity (e.g. 'cheeseburger' and 'fishburger' are created by analogy with 'hamburger' after its reanalysis). My hypothesis is that analogy plays the most important role in the changes of 'pretty', 'hard', but does so in different ways with different elements acting as attractor for the analogy.