1 Paul Bennett, Martin Durrell, Silke Scheible, Jason Whitt The GerManC Project A Representative Corpus of Early Modern German (1650-1800)

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1 1 Paul Bennett, Martin Durrell, Silke Scheible, Jason Whitt The GerManC Project A Representative Corpus of Early Modern German (1650-1800)

2 2 Representative historical corpus of German 1650-1800 Aim Facilitation of comparative studies of the development and standardisation of English and German in 17th and 18th centuries Resource needed ARCHER-corpus (also Helsinki Corpus) Model

3 Representativeness 1. Not complete texts, but extracts of approximately 2000 words (cf. Brown corpora and ARCHER) 2. Nine genres a. Dramas b. Newspapers c. Letters d. Sermons e. Narrative prose f. Journals g. Scholarly texts (humanities) h. Scholarly texts (science & medicine) i. Legal texts 3

4 Representativeness 3. Periods (cf. Bonn corpus of ENHG) 1650-1700 1700-17501750-1800 4. Regions a. North German b. West Central German c. East Central German d. West Upper German (incl.Swiss) e. East Upper German (incl. Austrian) 5. Three extracts of 2000 words per genre/period/region = approx. 900.000 words 4

5 Pilot Project: GerManC One year grant from ESRC: [March 2006 - March 2007] Team: Paul Bennett, Martin Durrell, Astrid Ensslin Aim: testing corpus design and aims with a single genre, and evaluating and developing a set of analytical tools Newspapers were selected as genre for the pilot 5

6 6 Breslau 1683 Wien 1780

7 Digitization 1. Scanning black letter (Fraktur) texts with OCR proved impractical and prone to error 2. All texts keyed in twice and the results compared electronically (double-keying) to eliminate mistakes 3. Only texts with 2000 words of (more or less) continuous German prose were selected 7

8 Extended GerManC Pilot project completed March 2007. Newspaper corpus lodged with Oxford Text Archive (and available on project website) Application for funding the extended corpus approved early 2008, with equal funding from ESRC and AHRC Original design maintained, eight further genres to be added Team: Paul Bennett, Martin Durrell, Silke Scheible, Jason Whitt Work started in September 2008 8

9 Development of tools A capable program for tokenization A program to recognize orthographic variants A lemmatization program with the ultimate aim of lemmatizing the whole corpus The development of an appropriate POS-tagger (on the basis of the Stuttgart-Tübingen Tagset) with a view to tagging the complete corpus Developing a program to enable automatic morphosyntactic tagging of the whole corpus If possible within the time constraints, developing a parser (possibly on the basis of the parser used in York for Old English) and parsing the complete corpus on this basis. 9

10 10 Changing norms Innerhalb der nach grammatischem Bestimmungswort zu erwartenden indet. Flexion des Nom./Akk.Pl. aller Genera (die klugen Frauen) kommt es zu allen Zeiten des Fnhd. zu einer zwischen -(e) und -(e)n schwankenden Formbildung Gramm. d. Fnhd. VI, 174

11 Findings: weak adjective inflection 1 (newspapers) process of standardization weak adjective inflection (Durrell et al. 2008) in nom./acc. pl., e.g. : die gute[n] Kinder (die Gute[n]) 11 1650-17001701-17501751-1800 -e-en-e-en-e-en North German20 (6)6 (5)633 (16)132 (14) West Central45 (18)4 (3)18 (4)10 (5)328 (6) East Central7 (2)18 (11)718 (3)231 (5) West Upper25 (7)6 (3)16 (3)6 (2)16 (3)16 (8) East Upper38 (22)14 (11)24 (3)11 (8)334 (5) Total135 (55)48 (33)71 (10)78 (34)25 (3)141 (38)

12 12 Changing norms Die Entwicklung vom späten 16. Jh. bis zur Mitte des 18. Jhs. erweist die Durchsetzung [von -en] als die Verallgemeinerung eines in erster Linie omd. Usus. Die [...] stilschichtliche Distribution bestätigt die Einschätzung bei Hemmer [...], daß -n über literarische Sprachvorbilder übernommen worden ist. (Gramm d. Fnhd. 176)

13 Findings: weak adjective inflection 2 (literary genres) Preliminary examples from drama and narrative prose in new extended corpus 13 1650-17001701-17501751-1800 -e-en-e-en-e-en North German219 (2)7 (2)23 (7)025 (7) West Central219 (7)6 (1)14 (5)68 (1) East Central224 (3)1 (1)23 (4)017 (3) West Upper5003 (1) 21 (5) East Upper211 (2)5 (1)3 (1) 14 (2) Total1373 (14)19 (5)78 (34)12 (2)85 (18)

14 14 Morphological simplification: zwei Bei den Grammatikern ist bis in die 2. Hälfte des 18. Jh. hinein die Genusdifferenzierung aufrechterhalten (Schottel, Bödiker, Gottsched) Erst Adelung (a. 1782) gibt ausschließlich die Form zwey für alle Genera. (Gramm. d. Fnhd. VII, 539)

15 15 Morphological simplification: zwei Am frühesten ist das Neutrum als Einheitsform festgeworden im Niederdeutschen [1303]. Im Ostmitteldeutschen (Obersächsischen und Schlesischen) herrscht es seit der Mitte des 17. Jhs. und drang von dort auch in die Literatursprache (Schirmunski, Deutsche Mundartkunde, 474).

16 16 zwei in newspaper corpus

17 Morphological simplification: zwei In newspapers occasional gender forms in those areas where they occur in the dialects, especially WCG and, notably, Erfurt 1769. zween in newspapers only before 1700, thereafter sporadic. Only one text (Frankfurt 1671) consistently maintains gender distinction 17

18 18 1650-17001700-17501750-1800 zweenzwozweizweenzwozweizweenzwozwei North German22217528 West Central German 3113116215 East Central German 23120115 West Upper German 14211113 East Upper German 313517 zwei in extended corpus to date

19 19 Morphological simplification: zwei In other texts zwei/zwey are dominant throughout, but other forms occur sporadically, even in the North. But Herder Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (North German 1772) uses the gender forms - but not consistently correctly (e.g. zwey Parteien)

20 Historical/cultural findings Media history Ensslin (2009), Im Unterhause groß Getöse: representations of 18th century British parliamentary democracy in Early Modern German newspaper discourse The representation of a parliamentary monarchy in 17th & 18th century Germany, with predominantly absolute rulers - but responding to increased interest in Britain ruled by the Hannoverians Initially straightforward factual presentations, concise and apparently objective, though with (intentional?) emphasis on the leading role of the king Later clear tendency towards stigmatization of the raucous debates in the House of Commons, with a much more subjective style of presentation and often sensationalist tone 20

21 21 Erfurt 1744

22 22 (Freyburgerzeitung, 28 January 1784): Die Veränderungen des neuen Ministeriums machen im Unterhause abscheulich groß Getöse. Dieß Ministerium hat wirklich schon die herrlichsten Namen aufgeheftet gekriegt: einige schelten selbes die kleine Pastetengebäckadministrazion, andere, die Bildsäule Nabukadnezars. Pitt, der nun an der Stelle des Fox ist, ist ein Gegenstand des öffentlichen Spottes scheelsüchtiger Satyriker.

23 Thank you Contacts: Martin.Durrell@manchester.ac.uk Paul.Bennett@manchester.ac.uk Silke.Scheible@manchester.ac.uk Richard.Whitt@manchester.ac.uk Web page: http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/research/projects/germanc/ 23

24 Project publications Martin Durrell, Astrid Ensslin and Paul Bennett, "The GerManC project", In: Sprache und Datenverarbeitung 31 (2007), 71-80. Martin Durrell, Astrid Ensslin und Paul Bennett, "Zur Standardisierung der Adjektivflexion im Deutschen im 18. Jahrhundert". In: W. Czachur and M. Czyzewska (eds.), Vom Wort zum Text. Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Kultur. Festschrift für Professor Józef Wiktorowicz zum 65. Geburtstag. Warszawa, Instytut Germanistyki Uniwersitetu Warszawskiego, 2008, pp. 259-267. Martin Durrell, Astrid Ensslin und Paul Bennett, "Zeitungen und Sprachausgleich im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. In: Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 127 (2008), Sonderheft, pp. 263-279 Ensslin, Astrid (2008), '"Im Unterhause abscheulich groß Getöse". Representations of 18th century British parliamentary democracy in early modern German newspaper discourse and their treatment of borrowings from English'. In: Pfalzgraf, F. & Rash, F. (eds.), "Anglo- German Literary Relations". Bern, etc.: Lang, pp. 73-96. 24