Currently

Syntactic optionality in North and West Germanic: insights from the history of Icelandic and Low German

This is my Postdoctoral Research project funded by the FWO (Research foundation – Flanders) at Ghent University (2021-2024), promoted by Prof. Anne Breitbarth.

Overview

Word order optionality in the postfinite domain in North and Continental West Germanic has attracted much attention in generative syntax in the past three decades, in particular the phenomena known as ‘Object Shift’ and ‘Scrambling’. However, the precise factors conditioning this word order optionality remain unclear, and there is to date not account which can explain the full cross-Germanic variation on display.

The project will shed light on this area via novel historical data from Icelandic (North Germanic) and Low German (Continental West Germanic). Both languages are well placed to fill gaps in the literature on the topic and are accessible for this type of study via parsed corpora (Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus; Corpus of Historical Low German).

In order to achieve this, a new annotation scheme which encodes the relevant information-structural and semantic properties will be developed as a generally applicable enhancement for historical Penn-style treebanks and will be employed for the two corpora in use.

Additionally, the project will develop a novel way to model gradience in word order flexibility within the architecture of Lexical-Functional Grammar in order to facilitate comparison between the Icelandic and Low German data and with further Germanic varieties.

Broader questions which the project plans to address

• What insights can be gained from comparing historical North and West Germanic varieties?
• How can we better capture uncertainty in corpus annotation and how can we harness this for theoretical insights?
• How can microvariation in word order be modelled in terms of gradient degrees of configurationality?
• How does information structure interact with subordination and coordination and how can this account for word order variation across complex sentences?

Upcoming project events

• Booth, Hannah & Kim Groothuis. Workshop: Expletives at the Syntax-Discourse Interface. To be held at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), 29 August — 1 September 2023, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

Upcoming project presentations

• Booth, Hannah. GrAnTop: A new scheme for the gradient annotation of topicality. Poster to be presented at the 10th Digital Humanities Benelux Conference, 31 May — 2 June 2023, Brussels.
• Booth, Hannah & Alexandra Rehn. Possession, case and the OCP in the history of High and Low German. Talk to be presented at the 24th Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference, 4 — 7 July 2023, Paris.

Project publications

• Booth, Hannah. To appear. Beyond given versus new: the proprial article in Old Icelandic. To appear in Kristin Bech & Alexander Pfaff (eds.), Diversity in the Old Germanic noun phrase. [Open Germanic Linguistics]. Berlin: Language Science Press.
• Booth, Hannah, Anne Breitbarth & Melissa Farasyn. To appear. Linke Satzperipherie, Mittelfeld und Nullsubjekte im Mittelniederdeutschen. Zur Untersuchung syntaktischer Phänomene mit dem CHLG. To appear in Marco Coniglio, Anabel Recker & Heike Sahm (eds.), Mittelniederdeutsch an der Schnittstelle zwischen Literaturwissenschaft, Sprachwissenschaft und Digital Humanities. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag.
• Booth, Hannah. 2022. Desiderata for the annotation of information structure in complex sentences. Proceedings of the 16th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW XVI), 31-43. Marseille, France: European Language Resources Association.
• Hägele, David, Christoph Schulz, Cedric Beschle, Hannah Booth, Miriam Butt, Andrea Barth, Oliver Deussen & Daniel Weiskopf. 2022. Uncertainty visualisation: fundamentals and recent developments. it – Information Technology: special issue on Quantitative Visual Computing 64(4-5), 121-132.

Previous project presentations

• Booth, Hannah. Discourse markers and the information-structural watershed: An LFG approach. Talk presented at Discourse Markers — Theories and Methods, 24 — 26 May 2023, Paris. Slides.
• Booth, Hannah. ‘Beyond given versus new: the proprial article in Old Icelandic’. Presented at the All Þings Germanic Group, Ghent University, December 2022.
• Booth, Hannah. ‘The annotation of information structure: challenges and opportunities’. Presented at the Ghent Generative Grammar Group (G4), Ghent University, November 2022.
• Booth, Hannah. ‘Desiderata for the annotation of information structure in complex sentences’. Presented at the Sixteenth Linguistic Annotation Workshop, co-located with LREC, Marseille, June 2022. Slides.
• Booth, Hannah. ‘The diversity of expletives: an LFG approach’. Presented at the workshop The Theory and Historical Development of Expletives, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, June 2022. Slides.
• Booth, Hannah. ‘The diversity of expletives: theoretical possibilities and diachronic opportunities’. Invited plenary at the Manchester Forum in Linguistics, University of Manchester, April 2022. Abstract.
• Rehn, Alexandra & Hannah Booth. ‘OCP effects in Germanic possession’. Presented at the Ghent Generative Grammar Group (G4), Ghent University, March 2022. Slides.
• Booth, Hannah. ‘Introduction to Lexical Functional Grammar’. Presented at the Ghent Generative Grammar Group (G4), Ghent University, March 2022.