Variability of corpus data and its implications for frequency changes and grammatical change Berit Johannsen [email protected]

MaLT Symposium 2015, Universität Bamberg, 27.11.2015

Methods and linguistic theories Theory

grammatical change

Method

corpus-based

2

Methods and linguistic theories Theory

grammatical change

role of frequency in grammaticalization and grammatical change increase in discourse frequency = ● ●

prerequisite for and concomitant of ongoing grammaticalization epiphenomenon showing that a newly developed structural option is spreading through genres and styles → establishment in the core grammatical system

diagnosed by

Method

corpus-based

increase in corpus frequency → descriptive statistics (Mair 2004, 2011)

3

Case study: History of the English present perfect - grammaticalized tense-aspect marker available from Old English - gradually taking over more and more functions - use becomes more and more regularized / systematic

(Lee 2002, Johannsen forthcoming, Elsness 1997, Görlach 1991)

4

present perfects per past-referring verb forms

Measuring frequency

Figure 1: Present perfects per past referring verb forms (Elsness 1997, 2014)

5

Case study: History of the English present perfect Penn Historical Corpora: ●

●

●

●

York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE): before 850-1250 1,450,000 words Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition (PPCME2): 1150-1500 1,156,000 words Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME): 1500-1710 1,738,000 words Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE): 1700-1914 949,000 words 6

Case study: History of the English present perfect present be or have + perfect participle: ●

automatically extracted for PPCME2, PPCEME, PPCMBE

●

manually edited for YCOE

7

Measuring frequency choice of ratio: ●

per words

●

per verbs (Gries 2006)

●

per past referring verb forms (Elsness 1997)

→ per finite verb forms

(Gries 2006)

8

Measuring frequency

Figure 2: Average frequencies of present perfects per finite verb forms in the Penn Corpora

9

Measuring variability Why measure and report variability? e.g. frequencies of present perfect in Present-Day English in different studies range from 0.7 to 9 perfects per 1,000 words

1) comparison between different studies 2) corpus-internal variability 3) corpus-external variability

(Gries 2006, Schlüter 2006)

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Measures of central tendency and variability

OE

ME

EME

LME

Figure 3: Boxplots of frequencies of present perfects in the periods of the Penn Corpora

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Measures of central tendency and variability: Boxplots outliers

interquartile range: central 50 % of the data points

25 % 25 %

(Butler 1985, Bortz & Schuster 2010)

whiskers: extend to the most extreme data point which is no more than 1.5 times the length of the box away from the box median: central value, cuts all data points into two halves

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Measures of central tendency and variability

OE

ME

EME

LME

Figure 3: Boxplots of frequencies of present perfects in the periods of the Penn Corpora

13

Measures of central tendency and variability

1

13

51

OE

34

15

3

17

ME

22

147

157

EME

144

33

37

31

LME

Figure 3: Boxplots of frequencies of present perfects in the periods of the Penn Corpora

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Measures of central tendency and variability

LETTERS

OE

ME

EME

LME

Figure 3: Boxplots of frequencies of present perfects in the periods of the Penn Corpora

15

Corpus-internal variability: Genre

Figure 4: Boxplots of frequencies of present perfects in the genres of the PPCEME

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Corpus-internal and -external variability: Genre

17

PPCME2

PPCEME

PPCMBE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIOGRAPHY, LIVES

BIOGRAPHY_LIFE_OF_ SAINT BIOGRAPHY_AUTO

BIOGRAPHY_AUTO

BIOGRAPHY_OTHER

BIOGRAPHY_OTHER

DIARY_PRIV

DIARY

DRAMA_COMEDY

DRAMA_COMEDY

EDUC_TREATISE

EDUC_TREATISE

FICTION

FICTION

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HISTORY

HISTORY

HISTORY

YCOE APOCRYPHA

CHARTERS AND WILLS

ECCLESIASTICAL LAWS

EPILOGUE FICTION

FICTION

GEOGRAPHY HANDBOOK_ASTRO HANDBOOKS, MEDICINE

HISTORY

HANDBOOK_MEDICINE

Genres 1

18

YCOE

PPCME2

PPCEME

PPCMBE

HOMILIES

HOMILY

LAW

LAW

LETTERS_NON-PRIV

LETTERS_NON-PRIV

LETTERS_PRIV

LETTERS_PRIV

PHILOSOPHY

PHILOSOPHY

PROCEEDINGS_TRIAL

PROCEEDINGS_TRIAL

SCIENCE_MEDICINE

SCIENCE_MEDICINE

SCIENCE_OTHER

SCIENCE_OTHER

SERMON

SERMON

SERMON

TRAVELOGUE

TRAVELOGUE

TRAVELOGUE

HOMILIES/BIOGRAPHY, LIVES HOMILY_POETRY LAWS

PHILOSOPHY

PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY/FICTION

PREFACE RELIGIOUS TREATISE

RELIG_TREATISE ROMANCE

RULE

RULE

SCIENCE SCIENCE, ASTRONOMY

TRAVELOGUE

Genres 2

19

PPCME2

PPCEME

PPCMBE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIOGRAPHY, LIVES

BIOGRAPHY_LIFE_OF_ SAINT BIOGRAPHY_AUTO

BIOGRAPHY_AUTO

BIOGRAPHY_OTHER

BIOGRAPHY_OTHER

DIARY_PRIV

DIARY

DRAMA_COMEDY

DRAMA_COMEDY

EDUC_TREATISE

EDUC_TREATISE

FICTION

FICTION

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HISTORY

HISTORY

HISTORY

YCOE APOCRYPHA

CHARTERS AND WILLS

ECCLESIASTICAL LAWS

EPILOGUE FICTION

FICTION

GEOGRAPHY HANDBOOK_ASTRO HANDBOOKS, MEDICINE

HISTORY

HANDBOOK_MEDICINE

Genres 1

20

PPCME2

PPCEME

PPCMBE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIOGRAPHY, LIVES

BIOGRAPHY_LIFE_OF_ SAINT BIOGRAPHY_AUTO

BIOGRAPHY_AUTO

BIOGRAPHY_OTHER

BIOGRAPHY_OTHER

DIARY_PRIV

DIARY

DRAMA_COMEDY

DRAMA_COMEDY

EDUC_TREATISE

EDUC_TREATISE

FICTION

FICTION

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HISTORY

HISTORY

HISTORY

YCOE APOCRYPHA

CHARTERS AND WILLS

ECCLESIASTICAL LAWS

EPILOGUE FICTION

FICTION

GEOGRAPHY HANDBOOK_ASTRO HANDBOOKS, MEDICINE

HISTORY

HANDBOOK_MEDICINE

Genres 1

21

PPCME2

PPCEME

PPCMBE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIOGRAPHY, LIVES

BIOGRAPHY_LIFE_OF_ SAINT BIOGRAPHY_AUTO

BIOGRAPHY_AUTO

BIOGRAPHY_OTHER

BIOGRAPHY_OTHER

DIARY_PRIV

DIARY

DRAMA_COMEDY

DRAMA_COMEDY

EDUC_TREATISE

EDUC_TREATISE

FICTION

FICTION

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HISTORY

HISTORY

HISTORY

YCOE APOCRYPHA

CHARTERS AND WILLS

ECCLESIASTICAL LAWS

EPILOGUE FICTION

FICTION

GEOGRAPHY HANDBOOK_ASTRO HANDBOOKS, MEDICINE

HISTORY

HANDBOOK_MEDICINE

Genres 1

22

PPCME2

PPCEME

PPCMBE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIBLE

BIOGRAPHY, LIVES

BIOGRAPHY_LIFE_OF_ SAINT BIOGRAPHY_AUTO

BIOGRAPHY_AUTO

BIOGRAPHY_OTHER

BIOGRAPHY_OTHER

DIARY_PRIV

DIARY

DRAMA_COMEDY

DRAMA_COMEDY

EDUC_TREATISE

EDUC_TREATISE

FICTION

FICTION

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HANDBOOK_OTHER

HISTORY

HISTORY

HISTORY

YCOE APOCRYPHA

CHARTERS AND WILLS

ECCLESIASTICAL LAWS

EPILOGUE FICTION

FICTION

GEOGRAPHY HANDBOOK_ASTRO HANDBOOKS, MEDICINE

HISTORY

HANDBOOK_MEDICINE

Genres 1

23

Corpus-internal and -external variability: Genre

Figure 5: Boxplots of frequencies of present perfects in the genre BIBLE

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Corpus-internal and -external variability: Genre

Figure 6: Boxplots of frequencies of present perfects in the genre FICTION

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Corpus-internal and -external variability: Genre

Figure 7: Boxplots of frequencies of present perfects in the genre HISTORY

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Summary Theory

grammatical change

role of frequency in grammaticalization and grammatical change increase in discourse frequency = ● ●

prerequisite for and concomitant of ongoing grammaticalisation epiphenomenon showing that a newly developed structural option is spreading through genres and styles → establishment in the core grammatical system

?

diagnosed by

Method

corpus-based

increase in corpus frequency → descriptive statistics 27

Thank you for your attention!

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References Bortz, Jürgen & Christof Schuster. 2010. Statistik für Human- und Sozialwissenschaftler. 7., vollständig überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage. (Springer-Lehrbuch). Berlin: Springer. Butler, Christopher. 1985. Statistics in linguistics. 1. publ. Oxford: Blackwell. http://www.uwe.ac.uk/hlss/llas/statistics-inlinguistics/bkindex.shtml. Elsness, Johan. 1997. The perfect and the preterite in contemporary and earlier English. (Topics in English Linguistics: TiEL 21). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Elsness, Johan. 2014. The present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English: A longitudinal look. In Kristin Davidse, Caroline Gentens, Lobke Ghesquière & Lieven Vandelanotte (eds.), Corpus interrogation and grammatical patterns, 81–103. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 63). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Görlach, Manfred. 1991. Introduction to Early Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gries, Stefan Τh. 2006. Exploring variability within and between corpora: Some methodological considerations. Corpora 1(2). 109–151. Johannsen, Berit. Forthcoming. From possessive-resultative to perfect? Re-assessing the meaning of [hæbb- + past participle] constructions in Old English prose. In Valentin Werner, Elena Seoane & Cristina Suárez-Gómez (eds.), Re-assessing the present perfect. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini & Ariel Diertani. 2004. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCEME-RELEASE-2/index.html. Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini & Ariel Diertani. 2010. The Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCMBE-RELEASE-1/index.html. Kroch, Anthony & Ann Taylor. 2000. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English. Second edition. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/histcorpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-3/index.html. Lee, Jeong-Hoon. 2002. The “have” perfect in Old English: How close was it to the Modern English perfect? In Donka Minkova & Robert Stockwell (eds.), Studies in the History of the English Language: A millennial perspective, 373–398. (Topics in English Linguistics 39). Berlin: De Gruyter. Mair, Christian. 2004. Corpus linguistics and grammaticalization theory: Statistics, frequencies, and beyond. In Hans Lindquist & Christian Mair (eds.), Corpus approaches to grammaticalization in English, 121–150. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 13). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Mair, Christian. 2011. Grammaticalization and corpus linguistics. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford handbook of grammaticalization, 239–249. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salager-Meyer, Françoise. 1992. A text-type and move analysis study of verb tense and modality distribution in medical English abstracts. English for Specific Purposes 11(2). 93–113. Schlüter, Norbert. 2006. How reliable are the results? Comparing corpus-based studies of the present perfect. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 54(2). 135–148. Taylor, Ann, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk & Frank Beths (eds.). 2003. The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. First edition. University of York: Department of Linguistics. http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/desc/2462.

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