Delimiting native and foreign syntax in Early Slavonic by enhancing digital corpora: non-finite clauses as intermediate phenomena

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The overarching goal of my research project is to contribute to the long-standing debate on the delimitation of native and borrowed syntactic elements in Old Church Slavonic (OCS), the language of the oldest extant Slavonic manuscripts, by enhancing digital corpora and employing quantitative methods. The debate stems from the fact that virtually all of the extant texts in OCS are translations from New Testament Greek. This often makes it challenging to distinguish slavish Greek calques from genuinely Slavonic constructions, especially considering that the two languages have overall comparatively similar linguistic structures. My project would attempt to assess the relative importance of language-external and language-internal factors in determining the distribution of non-finite clauses in OCS: these constructions could be seen as an intermediate group of phenomena between the native and the foreign ends of a hypothetical 'spectrum of nativeness', as they are generally thought to be essentially native constructions which have expanded their scope under Greek influence. In order to substantiate this thought quantitatively and have a better picture of the complex set of factors motivating the distribution of the different types of phenomena, I would be using different statistical models and two different datasets. Classification trees have been a successful model in predicting the various factors determining the behaviour of more extreme phenomena in the Greek-Slavonic spectrum, such as constituent order (imitating Greek to the greatest extent) and possessive constructions (practically completely independent of Greek). The application of such a model to the assessment of non-finite clauses is expected to produce very different results: both the Greek and the language-internal predictors should rank relatively high as predictors. The relative ranking of the Greek factors might indicate different 'levels of nativeness' of each constructions, whereas the relative importance of the language-internal factors might in turn motivate their status within Slavonic at the syntax-semantic interface. A crucial step in my project would be comparing the results yielded in the Greek-Slavonic parallel analyses with the distribution of the same phenomena in later original texts (i.e. in Later Church Slavonic and vernacular literature).In order to do so, TOROT (the chosen corpus) would be enhanced by adding a considerable amount of original Early Slavonic texts (mostly South Slavonic), which would then be automatically pre-processed (lemmatised and tagged for part of speech and morphology) and strategically annotated for the relevant syntactic phenomena.