George Walkden
Biographic Data
| ID | 529360 |
|---|---|
| NAME | George Walkden |
| GIVEN NAMES | George |
| FAMILY NAME | Walkden |
| SIGNATURE | WALKDEN G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Konstanz |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5950-9686 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Katerina Somers
Parataxis and hypotaxis in historical corpora
A recurring narrative in studies of syntactic change is that hypotaxis gains ground at the expense of parataxis. This report shows that this claim—if construed as a quantitative claim about the frequency of different types of clause combining—finds little support in parsed diachronic corpora of seven languages. Genre appears to be a factor that substantially influences the proportion of hypotaxis found in a text in consistent ways, but time does …
The strength of the phylogenetic signal in syntactic data
While phonological change has played a central role in assessing linguistic relatedness since the nineteenth century, the usefulness of syntactic change for this purpose has remained debated – despite recent work on the question with a variety of results. In our study, we analyze the phylogenetic signal of syntactic data using state-of-the-art Bayesian algorithms and the SSWL database (Koopman 2012–). With the phylogenetic model, we infer a minim…
Sociolinguistic Typology Meets Historical Corpus Linguistics
This paper makes the case for using historical corpora to assess questions of sociolinguistic typology. A full account of any contact‐induced change will need to establish what the linguistic innovation in question was, who was in contact, where and when the contact took place and how the change happened, both at the individual level and at the population level. The historical corpus approach complements other methods by narrowing down the where …
Diachrony and Diachronica
In this second set of contributions on the 40th anniversary of Diachronica, seven historical linguists provide perspectives on the current state of the field and aims for the future. While the authors in issue 40.4 focused on the ideas that have structured the field – the actuation problem, the relationship between synchrony and diachrony, and how we do our work – this current set of contributions focus on method: what we do, how and why we do it…
Verb-second in spoken and written Estonian
This paper investigates clausal constituent order in Estonian, a language often described in the literature as exhibiting a verb-second “tendency”. We present a corpusbased study of ordering in independent affirmative declarative clauses, drawing data from both written and spoken corpora. Our results show that, while written Estonian is robustly a verb-second language along the same lines as the modern Germanic standard languages, spoken Estonian…
Interpreting (un)interpretability
published
Complexity as L2-difficulty
Recent work has cast doubt on the idea that all languages are equally complex; however, the notion of syntactic complexity remains underexplored. Taking complexity to equate to difficulty of acquisition for late L2 acquirers, we propose an operationalization of syntactic complexity in terms of uninterpretable features. Trudgill’s sociolinguistic typology predicts that sociohistorical situations involving substantial late L2 acquisition should be …
Deriving the Constant Rate Effect
The Constant Rate Hypothesis (Kroch 1989) states that when grammar competition leads to language change, the rate of replacement is the same in all contexts affected by the change (the Constant Rate Effect, or CRE). Despite nearly three decades of empirical work into this hypothesis, the theoretical foundations of the CRE remain problematic: it can be shown that the standard way of operationalizing the CRE via sets of independent logistic curves …
Word order change in acquisition and language contact
published
V P-fronting with and without remnant movement
In this paper, we consider two kinds of v P-fronting constructions in English and argue that they receive quite different analyses. First, we show that English v P-preposing does not have the properties that would be expected of a movement-derived dependency. Evidence for this conclusion is adduced from the licensing conditions on its occurrence, from the availability of morphological mismatches, and from reconstruction facts. By contrast, we sho…
Null Subjects in the Lindisfarne Gospels as Evidence for Syntactic Variation in Old English
published
Null Subjects in Early Icelandic
This paper investigates the possibility of subject omission in the history of Icelandic, including the syntactic and pragmatic conditions under which it could arise. Based on regression analysis of substantial data drawn from the IcePaHC corpus, we provide robust quantitative support for Hjartardóttir's (1987) claim that null subjects persist until a very late stage in Icelandic. We also argue, contra Sigurðsson (1993), that only one licensing me…
English is (still) a West Germanic language
In their recent book, English: The Language of the Vikings , Joseph Embley Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund attempt to make the case that from its Middle period onwards, English is a North Germanic language, descended from the Norse varieties spoken in Medieval England, rather than a West Germanic language, as traditionally assumed. In this review article we critique Emonds & Faarlund's proposal, focusing particularly on the syntactic evidence that …
The HeliPaD
This short paper introduces the HeliPaD, a new parsed corpus of Old Saxon (Old Low German). It is annotated according to the standards of the Penn Corpora of Historical English, enriched with lemmatization and additional morphological attributes as well as textual and metrical annotation. This paper provides an overview of its main features and compares it to existing resources such as the Deutsch Diachron Digital version of the Old Saxon Heliand…
Syntax over Time
This collection of essays provides a critical investigation of syntactic change and how it is related to the lexicon, morphology, and information structure. It draws on data from a wide variety of languages and will be of interest to linguists working on syntactic variation and change
On Constructing a Theory of Grammatical Change
Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Graeme Trousdale, Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. pp. xvii + 278. The last few decades have seen the growth of a community of linguists who, though diverse in their beliefs and assumptions about other aspects of linguistics, nevertheless share a commitment to the construction as the basic unit of linguistic analysis. In construction grammar (henceforth CxG), as …
Syntactic Reconstruction and Proto-Germanic
This book investigates methods, possibilities, and limitations in the reconstruction of syntax in a framework which holds that the object of enquiry is knowledge of language and which acknowledges that the transmission of that knowledge is discontinuous. The main objections to syntactic reconstruction raised in the literature are assessed, and it is argued that the reconstruction of syntax is qualitatively different from lexical-phonological reco…
The correspondence problem in syntactic reconstruction
While considerable swathes of the phonology and morphology of proto-languages have been reconstructed using the comparative method, syntax has lagged behind. Jeffers (1976) and Lightfoot (2002a), among others, have questioned whether syntax can be reconstructed at all, claiming that a fundamental problem exists in applying the techniques of phonological reconstruction to syntax. Others, such as Harris & Campbell (1995) and, following them, Barðda…
Null subjects in Old English
The possibility of referential null subjects in Old English has been the subject of conflicting assertions. Hulk and van Kemenade (1995:245) stated that "the phenomenon of referential pro -drop does not exist in Old English," but van Gelderen (2000:137) claimed that "Old English has pro-drop." This paper presents a systematic quantitative investigation of referential null subjects in Old English, drawing on the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus…
Against inertia
Null subjects in Old English
The possibility of referential null subjects in Old English has been the subject of conflicting assertions. Hulk and van Kemenade (1995:245) stated that "the phenomenon of referential pro -drop does not exist in Old English," but van Gelderen (2000:137) claimed that "Old English has pro-drop." This paper presents a systematic quantitative investigation of referential null subjects in Old English, drawing on the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus…
V P-fronting with and without remnant movement
In this paper, we consider two kinds of v P-fronting constructions in English and argue that they receive quite different analyses. First, we show that English v P-preposing does not have the properties that would be expected of a movement-derived dependency. Evidence for this conclusion is adduced from the licensing conditions on its occurrence, from the availability of morphological mismatches, and from reconstruction facts. By contrast, we sho…
On Constructing a Theory of Grammatical Change
Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Graeme Trousdale, Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. pp. xvii + 278. The last few decades have seen the growth of a community of linguists who, though diverse in their beliefs and assumptions about other aspects of linguistics, nevertheless share a commitment to the construction as the basic unit of linguistic analysis. In construction grammar (henceforth CxG), as …
Deriving the Constant Rate Effect
The Constant Rate Hypothesis (Kroch 1989) states that when grammar competition leads to language change, the rate of replacement is the same in all contexts affected by the change (the Constant Rate Effect, or CRE). Despite nearly three decades of empirical work into this hypothesis, the theoretical foundations of the CRE remain problematic: it can be shown that the standard way of operationalizing the CRE via sets of independent logistic curves …
The HeliPaD
This short paper introduces the HeliPaD, a new parsed corpus of Old Saxon (Old Low German). It is annotated according to the standards of the Penn Corpora of Historical English, enriched with lemmatization and additional morphological attributes as well as textual and metrical annotation. This paper provides an overview of its main features and compares it to existing resources such as the Deutsch Diachron Digital version of the Old Saxon Heliand…
Against inertia
The correspondence problem in syntactic reconstruction
While considerable swathes of the phonology and morphology of proto-languages have been reconstructed using the comparative method, syntax has lagged behind. Jeffers (1976) and Lightfoot (2002a), among others, have questioned whether syntax can be reconstructed at all, claiming that a fundamental problem exists in applying the techniques of phonological reconstruction to syntax. Others, such as Harris & Campbell (1995) and, following them, Barðda…
Null subjects in Old English
The possibility of referential null subjects in Old English has been the subject of conflicting assertions. Hulk and van Kemenade (1995:245) stated that "the phenomenon of referential pro -drop does not exist in Old English," but van Gelderen (2000:137) claimed that "Old English has pro-drop." This paper presents a systematic quantitative investigation of referential null subjects in Old English, drawing on the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus…
Syntactic Reconstruction and Proto-Germanic
This book investigates methods, possibilities, and limitations in the reconstruction of syntax in a framework which holds that the object of enquiry is knowledge of language and which acknowledges that the transmission of that knowledge is discontinuous. The main objections to syntactic reconstruction raised in the literature are assessed, and it is argued that the reconstruction of syntax is qualitatively different from lexical-phonological reco…
Syntax over Time
This collection of essays provides a critical investigation of syntactic change and how it is related to the lexicon, morphology, and information structure. It draws on data from a wide variety of languages and will be of interest to linguists working on syntactic variation and change
On Constructing a Theory of Grammatical Change
Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Graeme Trousdale, Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. pp. xvii + 278. The last few decades have seen the growth of a community of linguists who, though diverse in their beliefs and assumptions about other aspects of linguistics, nevertheless share a commitment to the construction as the basic unit of linguistic analysis. In construction grammar (henceforth CxG), as …
Null Subjects in the Lindisfarne Gospels as Evidence for Syntactic Variation in Old English
published
Null Subjects in Early Icelandic
This paper investigates the possibility of subject omission in the history of Icelandic, including the syntactic and pragmatic conditions under which it could arise. Based on regression analysis of substantial data drawn from the IcePaHC corpus, we provide robust quantitative support for Hjartardóttir's (1987) claim that null subjects persist until a very late stage in Icelandic. We also argue, contra Sigurðsson (1993), that only one licensing me…
English is (still) a West Germanic language
In their recent book, English: The Language of the Vikings , Joseph Embley Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund attempt to make the case that from its Middle period onwards, English is a North Germanic language, descended from the Norse varieties spoken in Medieval England, rather than a West Germanic language, as traditionally assumed. In this review article we critique Emonds & Faarlund's proposal, focusing particularly on the syntactic evidence that …
The HeliPaD
This short paper introduces the HeliPaD, a new parsed corpus of Old Saxon (Old Low German). It is annotated according to the standards of the Penn Corpora of Historical English, enriched with lemmatization and additional morphological attributes as well as textual and metrical annotation. This paper provides an overview of its main features and compares it to existing resources such as the Deutsch Diachron Digital version of the Old Saxon Heliand…
Deriving the Constant Rate Effect
The Constant Rate Hypothesis (Kroch 1989) states that when grammar competition leads to language change, the rate of replacement is the same in all contexts affected by the change (the Constant Rate Effect, or CRE). Despite nearly three decades of empirical work into this hypothesis, the theoretical foundations of the CRE remain problematic: it can be shown that the standard way of operationalizing the CRE via sets of independent logistic curves …
Word order change in acquisition and language contact
published
V P-fronting with and without remnant movement
In this paper, we consider two kinds of v P-fronting constructions in English and argue that they receive quite different analyses. First, we show that English v P-preposing does not have the properties that would be expected of a movement-derived dependency. Evidence for this conclusion is adduced from the licensing conditions on its occurrence, from the availability of morphological mismatches, and from reconstruction facts. By contrast, we sho…
Interpreting (un)interpretability
published
Complexity as L2-difficulty
Recent work has cast doubt on the idea that all languages are equally complex; however, the notion of syntactic complexity remains underexplored. Taking complexity to equate to difficulty of acquisition for late L2 acquirers, we propose an operationalization of syntactic complexity in terms of uninterpretable features. Trudgill’s sociolinguistic typology predicts that sociohistorical situations involving substantial late L2 acquisition should be …
Verb-second in spoken and written Estonian
This paper investigates clausal constituent order in Estonian, a language often described in the literature as exhibiting a verb-second “tendency”. We present a corpusbased study of ordering in independent affirmative declarative clauses, drawing data from both written and spoken corpora. Our results show that, while written Estonian is robustly a verb-second language along the same lines as the modern Germanic standard languages, spoken Estonian…
Sociolinguistic Typology Meets Historical Corpus Linguistics
This paper makes the case for using historical corpora to assess questions of sociolinguistic typology. A full account of any contact‐induced change will need to establish what the linguistic innovation in question was, who was in contact, where and when the contact took place and how the change happened, both at the individual level and at the population level. The historical corpus approach complements other methods by narrowing down the where …
Diachrony and Diachronica
In this second set of contributions on the 40th anniversary of Diachronica, seven historical linguists provide perspectives on the current state of the field and aims for the future. While the authors in issue 40.4 focused on the ideas that have structured the field – the actuation problem, the relationship between synchrony and diachrony, and how we do our work – this current set of contributions focus on method: what we do, how and why we do it…
The strength of the phylogenetic signal in syntactic data
While phonological change has played a central role in assessing linguistic relatedness since the nineteenth century, the usefulness of syntactic change for this purpose has remained debated – despite recent work on the question with a variety of results. In our study, we analyze the phylogenetic signal of syntactic data using state-of-the-art Bayesian algorithms and the SSWL database (Koopman 2012–). With the phylogenetic model, we infer a minim…
Parataxis and hypotaxis in historical corpora
A recurring narrative in studies of syntactic change is that hypotaxis gains ground at the expense of parataxis. This report shows that this claim—if construed as a quantitative claim about the frequency of different types of clause combining—finds little support in parsed diachronic corpora of seven languages. Genre appears to be a factor that substantially influences the proportion of hypotaxis found in a text in consistent ways, but time does …
Katerina Somers
Linguistics (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (13 works) · Linguistics and language evolution (8 works) · History (6 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (6 works) · Syntax (5 works) · German (4 works)