Hannah Booth

    Linguistics

    Research Areas

    Icelandic syntax & discourse

    Expletives

    Low German syntax

    Corpora & annotation

    Linguistic Theory

    Language change methods

    Publications

    Peer-reviewed journal articles

    Booth, Hannah. 2025. Time-clefts, expletives and orality in Early Icelandic saga narratives. Evolutionary Linguistic Theory. Special Issue: The evolution of expletives 6(1), 27–58. Preprint. Lay summary.

    Booth, Hannah & Kim A. Groothuis. 2024. Discourse-related expletives: Challenges and opportunities. Open Linguistics. 10(1), 1–41.

    Booth, Hannah & Tianyi Zhao. 2023. A broader perspective on “basic” word order: ditransitives in Middle Low German. Journal of Historical Syntax. 7(21), 1–63.

    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.

    Booth, Hannah. 2021. Revisiting the configurationality issue in Old Icelandic. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6(1): 130, 1–59.

    Booth, Hannah & Christin Beck. 2021. Verb-second and verb-first in the history of Icelandic. Journal of Historical Syntax 5(28), 1–53.

    Booth, Hannah. 2019. Cataphora, expletives and impersonal constructions in the history of Icelandic. Nordic Journal of Linguistics. Special Issue: New Perspectives on Diachronic Syntax in North Germanic 42(2), 139–164. Postprint.

    Peer-reviewed book chapters

    Rehn, Alexandra & Hannah Booth. To appear. OCP effects in Germanic possession. To appear in Ermenegildo Bidese & Federica Cognola (eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop (CGSW 35). Berlin: Language Science Press.

    Booth, Hannah. 2025. Narration and clause-internal adverbs: an information-structural watershed in Old Icelandic. In Ulrike Demske & Barthe Bloom (eds.), Discourse structure and narration: A diachronic view from Germanic, 155-203. Berlin: Language Science Press.

    Booth, Hannah, Anne Breitbarth & Melissa Farasyn. 2024. Linke Satzperipherie, Mittelfeld und Nullsubjekte im Mittelniederdeutschen. Zur Untersuchung syntaktischer Phänomene mit dem CHLG. In Marco Coniglio, Anabel Recker & Heike Sahm (eds.), Mittelniederdeutsch zwischen Korpuslinguistik und Literaturwissenschaft, 45–68. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag.

    Booth, Hannah. 2024. Beyond given versus new: The proprial article in Old Icelandic. In Kristin Bech & Alexander Pfaff (eds.), Noun phrases in early Germanic languages, 219–268. Berlin: Language Science Press.

    Bech, Kristin, Hannah Booth, Kersti Börjars, Tine Breban, Svetlana Petrova & George Walkden. 2024. Noun phrase modifiers in early Germanic: A comparative corpus study of Old English, Old High German, Old Icelandic, and Old Saxon. In Kristin Bech & Alexander Pfaff (eds.), Noun phrases in early Germanic languages, 71–109. Berlin: Language Science Press.

    Booth, Hannah & Miriam Butt. 2023. LFG and historical linguistics. In Mary Dalrymple (ed.), Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar, 905–960. Berlin: Language Science Press.

    Booth, Hannah & Alexandra Rehn. 2023. The Possessor Linking Construction in Middle Low German and Alemannic. In Augustin Speyer & Jenny Diener (eds.), Syntax aus Saarbrücker Sicht 5: Beiträge der SaRDiS-Tagung zur Dialektsyntax [Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik – Beihefte], 31–70. Stuttgart: Steiner-Verlag. Preprint.

    Walkden, George & Hannah Booth. 2020. Reassessing the historical evidence for embedded V2. In Rebecca Woods & Sam Wolfe (eds.), Rethinking Verb Second, 536–554. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Postprint.

    Booth, Hannah. 2020. Expletives in Icelandic: a corpus study. In Bridget Drinka (Ed.), Historical Linguistics 2017: Selected Papers from the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 364–384. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Postprint.

    Peer-reviewed conference proceedings

    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.

    Beck, Christin, Hannah Booth, Mennatallah El-Assady & Miriam Butt. 2020. Representation problems in linguistic annotations: Ambiguity, variation, uncertainty, error and bias. In Dipper, Stephanie, Amir Zeldes, Luke Gessler & Adam Roussel (Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, 60–73. Barcelona, Spain (online): Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Booth, Hannah, Anne Breitbarth, Aaron Ecay & Melissa Farasyn. 2020. A Penn-style treebank of Middle Low German. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), 766–775. Marseille, France: European Language Resources Association

    Booth, Hannah & Christin Schätzle. 2019. The syntactic encoding of information structure in the history of Icelandic. In Miriam Butt, Tracy Holloway King & Ida Toivonen (Eds.), Proceedings of the LFG’19 Conference, Australian National University, 69–89. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

    Schätzle, Christin & Hannah Booth. 2019. DiaHClust: an iterative hierarchical clustering approach for identifying stages in language change. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, 26–135, Florence, Italy: Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Booth, Hannah, Christin Schätzle, Kersti Börjars & Miriam Butt. 2017. Dative subjects and the rise of positional licensing in Icelandic. In Miriam Butt & Tracy Holloway King (Eds.), Proceedings of the LFG’17 Conference, University of Konstanz, 104–124. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

    Dissertations

    Booth, Hannah. 2018. Expletives and Clause Structure: Syntactic Change in Icelandic. Doctoral dissertation, University of Manchester.

    Booth, Hannah 2015. Creating coherence: A study of Old Norse connectives. Doctoral dissertation, University of Aberdeen.

    Booth, Hannah. 2014. The fate of the instrumental case in the history of German. Optional BA dissertation, University of Cambridge.

    Booth, Hannah. 2013. Low German in Scandinavia: A study of language contact in Hanseatic Bergen. Year Abroad BA dissertation, University of Cambridge.

    Book reviews

    Booth, Hannah. 2021. Dalrymple, Mary, John J. Lowe & Louise Mycock: The Oxford reference guide to Lexical Functional Grammar. Folia Linguistica 55(2), 597-601.

    Events & Talks

    Events organised by me

    2023. Are you smarter than ChatGPT? Live public experiment organised with members of Ghent Generative Grammar Group as part of the Flanders Dag van de Wetenschap, Ghent, November 2023.

    2023. Expletives at the Syntax-Discourse Interface. Workshop organised with Kim A. Groothuis at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Societies Linguistica Europaea (SLE), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, August/September 2023. Introduction. Discussion.

    Invited talks

    Booth, Hannah. 2022. The diversity of expletives: an LFG approach. Invited talk at the workshop The Theory and Historical Development of Expletives, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, June 2022.

    Booth, Hannah. 2022. The diversity of expletives: theoretical possibilities and diachronic opportunities. Invited plenary at the Manchester Forum in Linguistics, University of Manchester, April 2022.

    Booth, Hannah. 2018. Expletives and clause structure in the history of Icelandic. Invited talk at the Workshop on Word Order in Scandinavian Languages, University of Konstanz, December 2018.

    Booth, Hannah. 2018. Corpus linguistics and medieval studies: old problems, new methods. Invited talk at the Centre for Scandinavian Studies, University of Aberdeen, May 2018.

    Accepted conference talks

    Booth, Hannah & Alexandra Rehn. 2023. Possession, case and the OCP in the history of High and Low German. Talk at the 24th Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference, Université Paris Cité, July 2023.

    Booth, Hannah. 2023. Discourse markers and the information-structural watershed: An LFG approach. Talk at the conference Discourse markers – theories and methods, Université Paris Cité, May 2023.

    Booth, Hannah. 2022. Desiderata for the annotation of information structure in complex sentences. Talk at the Sixteenth Linguistic Annotation Workshop, co-located with LREC, Marseille, June 2022.

    Rehn, Alexandra & Hannah Booth. 2021. OCP effects in Germanic possession: dialectal and diachronic evidence. Talk at the 35th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop, University of Trento, June 2021.

    Booth, Hannah & Christin Beck. 2021. V1, V2 and information structure in the history of Icelandic. Talk at the 12th International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics, University of Oslo, June 2021.

    Booth, Hannah & Christin Beck. 2020. Information structure and word order change: verb-first and verb-second in Icelandic. Talk at the 22nd Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) conference, University of Konstanz, May 2020.

    Booth, Hannah & Alexander Rehn. 2020. Germanic possessor doubling is possessor linking. Talk at the Saarbrücker Runder Tisch für Dialektsyntax, Universität des Saarlandes, November 2020.

    Booth, Hannah. 2020. Argument configurationality and discourse configurationality in Old Icelandic. Talk at the 25th International Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference, University of Oslo, June 2020.

    Schätzle, Christin & Hannah Booth. 2020. Investigating interactional syntactic change in Middle English: insights from visual analytics. Talk at ICAME 41, Heidelberg University, May 2020.

    Booth, Hannah & Christin Schätzle. 2019. Verb-first and verb-second in the history of Icelandic. Talk at the 24th International LFG Conference (LFG2019), Australian National University, July 2019.

    Booth, Hannah & Tine Breban. 2019. Expletives in competition: diverging pathways of change in English and Icelandic. Talk at the 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Australian National University, July 2019.

    Booth, Hannah. 2018. Structural ambiguity and the history of impersonal constructions in Icelandic. Talk at Grammatikk i Norden 2 (GRAMINO), University of Oslo, May 2018.

    Booth, Hannah. 2018. Structural ambiguity, expletives and impersonal constructions in the history of Icelandic. Talk at the Manchester Forum in Linguistics, University of Manchester, April 2018.

    Booth, Hannah & Christin Schätzle. 2017. Word order change, case and expletives in the history of Icelandic. Talk at the 19th Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference (DiGS 19), Stellenbosch University and the University of the Western Cape, September 2017.

    Booth, Hannah. 2017. Just how oral are the sagas? New insights from corpus linguistics. Talk at the Nordic Research Network 2017 (NRN 2017), University of Aberdeen, August 2017.

    Booth, Hannah & Christin Schätzle. 2017. Subjects, case and word order change in Icelandic: a corpus study. Talk at the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, University of Texas at San Antonio, July 2017.

    Booth, Hannah. 2017. Expletives in Icelandic: a diachronic study. Talk at the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, University of Texas at San Antonio, July 2017.

    Booth, Hannah, Kersti Börjars, Miriam Butt & Christin Schätzle. 2017. Dative subjects and the rise of positional licensing in Icelandic. Talk at the 22nd International Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference, Universität Konstanz, July 2017.

    Booth, Hannah. 2017. Expletives in Icelandic: a diachronic study. Talk at the Manchester Forum in Linguistics, University of Manchester, April 2017.

    Bech, Kristin, Hannah Booth, Kersti Börjars, Tine Breban, Svetlana Petrova, George Walkden & Sheila Watts. 2016. Modifiers in early Germanic: a comparative corpus study. Talk at Grammar & Corpora 2016, Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim, November 2016.

    Booth, Hannah, Kersti Börjars & John Payne. 2016. Non-recursive modification in Old Icelandic. Talk at Nätverket för nordisk syntaxhistoria 8, Uppsala Universitet, October 2016.

    Booth, Hannah. 2016. Connectives and the spoken/written dimension: connective profiling Old Norse texts. Talk at the conference Diachronic Corpora, Genre and Language Change, University of Nottingham, April 2016.

    Accepted conference posters

    Booth, Hannah. 2023. Position meets function: expletives as expressions of grammatical necessity from an LFG perspective. Poster presented at the conference Topic, Focus and Subject: Between Grammatical Necessity and Information-structural Load, University of Osnabrück, September 2023.

    Booth, Hannah. 2023. GrAnTop: A new scheme for the gradient annotation of topicality. Poster presented at the 10th Digital Humanities Benelux Conference, KBR Brussels, June 2023.

    Beck, Christin, Hannah Booth, Mennatallah El-Assady & Miriam Butt. 2020. Representation problems in linguistic annotations: ambiguity, variation, uncertainty, error and bias. Poster presented at the 14th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, co-located with COLING 2020, Barcelona, December 2020.

    Schätzle, Christin & Hannah Booth. 2019. DiaHClust: an iterative hierarchical clustering approach for identifying stages in language change. Poster presented at the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, Florence, Italy, August 2019.

    In-house talks & posters

    Booth, Hannah. 2024. Time-clefts in Early Icelandic saga narratives. Talk at the All Þings Germanic Group, Ghent University, March 2024.

    Booth, Hannah & Kim Groothuis. Expletives at the syntax-discourse interface. Talk at Ghent Generative Grammar Group (G4), Ghent University, September 2023.

    Booth, Hannah. 2023. Economy, configurationality and expletives: An LFG approach. Talk at the Ghent Generative Grammar Group (G4), Ghent University, June 2023.

    Booth, Hannah. 2022. Beyond given versus new: the proprial article in Old Icelandic. Talk at the All Þings Germanic Group, Ghent University, December 2022.

    Booth, Hannah. 2022. The annotation of information structure: challenges and opportunities. Talk at Ghent Generative Grammar Group (G4), Ghent University, November 2022.

    Rehn, Alexandra & Hannah Booth. 2022. OCP effects in Germanic possession. Talk at Ghent Generative Grammar Group (G4), Ghent University, March 2022.

    Booth, Hannah. 2022. Introduction to Lexical Functional Grammar. Talk at Ghent Generative Grammar Group (G4), Ghent University, March 2022.

    Booth, Hannah. 2019. A Penn-style Treebank of Middle Low German. Talk at the University of Konstanz, December 2019. (Joint work with Anne Breitbarth, Aaron Easy & Melissa Farasyn.)

    Breitbarth, Anne, Melissa Farasyn & Hannah Booth. 2019. Parsing the Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG). Poster presented at the LW Research Day, Ghent University, September 2019.

    Booth, Hannah. 2019. How to fill the prefield in Icelandic: the diachrony of expletives and Stylistic Fronting. Talk at the University of Konstanz, June 2019.

    Booth, Hannah. 2017. Tracking language change through historical corpora: the rise of expletive subjects in Icelandic. iPoster presented at the Postgraduate Summer Research Showcase, University of Manchester, June 2017.

    Teaching

    Accreditations

    I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK, which recognises effectiveness of practice in university teaching.

    MA-level courses

    Language Variation and Change | Ghent University | 2021/22

    • Provides students with a sound understanding of the relationship between linguistic variation and change, particularly with respect to morphosyntax, as well as models and methods concerning the analysis of spatial variation and diachronic change

    Lexical Functional Grammar | University of Konstanz | 2019/20 & 2021

    • Introduces the basic principles underlying LFG; students practice working with the formalism in a step-by-step approach and explore how LFG can be used to analyse various phenomena from a wide range of world languages

    Grammar Development | University of Konstanz | 2021

    • Introduces students to a framework for rule-based machine language processing, XLE, a syntactic parsing environment using Lexical Functional Grammar as the theoretical foundation

    Analysing Syntactic Change | University of Konstanz | 2019/20

    • Examines how various syntactic change phenomena can be analysed within a theoretical framework of syntax, in particular that of Lexical Functional Grammar; also features a practical component introducing students to historical treebank

    Middle English | University of Konstanz | 2020

    • Explores points of linguistic interest in Middle English and discusses processes of language change underway during the period; also features a practical component where students develop skills in reading, translating and commenting on Middle English texts

    BA-level courses

    English Syntax | University of Konstanz | 2021

    • Introduces students to the modern study of syntax as an attempt to understand and model properties of the human mind, providing an introduction to the technical tools and concepts that underpin formal approaches to grammar

    Einführung in die Linguistik | University of Konstanz | 2020/21

    • Introduces students to the core concepts and basic principles of linguistics, covering phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics

    Sociolinguistics | University of Konstanz | 2019/20

    • Introduces key topics in sociolinguistics with respect to core linguistic areas (phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics)

    Historical Syntax | University of Manchester | 2018

    • Introduces students to the key principles and debates concerning syntactic change, with theoretical and practical components

    Old & Middle English | University of Manchester | 2018

    • Introduces students to the Old and Middle English language and explores points of linguistic interest