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 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 6

7 Digitization Scanning black letter (Fraktur) texts with OCR proved impractical and prone to error All texts keyed in twice and the results compared electronically (“double-keying“) to eliminate mistakes Texts keyed into XML Editor and marked- up according to TEI 5 Lite guidelines Only texts with 2000 words of (more or less) continuous German prose were selected 7

8 Der in seiner Freyheit vergnügte ALCBIADES (Drama: North German, 1700) 8

9 Development of tools A program for tokenization A program to recognize orthographic variants A lemmatization program with the ultimate aim of lemmatizing the whole corpus The development of a POS-tagger (on the basis of the Stuttgart-Tübingen Tagset, and based on the TreeTagger) with a view to tagging the complete corpus Developing a program to enable more detailed 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 Case Study I: Changing norms weak adjective inflection “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 1650-17001700-17501750-1800 -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 Genre-dependent variant selection “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 1650-17001700-17501750-1800 -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 Case Study II: Morphological simplification zween/zwo/zwei-zwey “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 Case Study II: Morphological simplification zween/zwo/zwei-zwey “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 1650-17001700-17501750-1800 zweenzwozweizweenzwozweizweenzwozwei North German1288 West Central German 13328113 East Central German 22218 West Upper German 123 East Upper German 12613 ‘zwei’ in newspaper corpus

17 17 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

18 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 18

19 Other investigations The development of the würde + Infinitive construction (Smirnova 2006; Durrell 2007) Das Doppelperfekt (Topalović 2007) Evidentiality and text type (Whitt 2008) The general notion of text type/genre/register as it relates to historical corpora 19

20 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/ 20

21 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. 21

22 Other references Durrell, Martin. 2007. "'Deutsch ist eine würde-lose Sprache'. On the history of a failed prescription". In: Stephan Elspaß, Nils Langer, Joachim Scharloth & Wim Vandenbussche (eds.), Germanic Language Histories 'from Below' (1700-2000). (Studia Linguistica Germanica 86). Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, pp. 243-258. Smirnova, Elena. 2006. Die Entwicklung der Konstruktion würde + Infinitiv im Deutschen: Eine funktional-semantische Analyse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung sprachhistorischer Aspekte. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. Topalović, Elvira. To appear. "Perfekt II und Plusquamperfekt II. Zur historischen Kontinuität doppelter Perfektbildungen im Deutschen". In: Claudine Moulin, Fausto Ravida & Nikolaus Ruge (eds.), Sprache in der Stadt. Akten der 25. Tagung des Internationalen Arbeitskreises Historische Stadtsprachenforschung. Luxemburg, 11.-13. Oktober 2007. Heidelberg: Winter. Whitt, Richard J. 2008. Evidentiality and Perception Verbs in English and German: A Corpus-Based Analysis from the Early Modern Period to the Present. Ph.D. Dissertation: The University of California, Berkeley. 22