Auxiliaries in Old Dutch

A diachronic parallel corpus exploration

Bibliographic Data

ID22024291
AuthorsEvie Coussé (0000-0002-2518-8498, University of Gothenburg), Gerlof Bouma (0000-0003-1303-0658, University of Gothenburg), N van der Sijs (0000-0001-9042-6336, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal)
Year2024
Publication date2024-11-11
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Historical Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2210-2116 • E-ISSN: 2210-2124
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/jhl.23041.cou
OpenAlexW4404236164
LanguageEN
References cited21

This study explores the use of auxiliaries in the oldest text available for Old Dutch, the Wachtendonck Psalter, dating from the 10th century. Our aim is to understand why there are so few different auxiliaries in this text in comparison to other texts in Old Dutch. We tackle this question by taking a historical comparative perspective, using methodological insights and techniques from corpus-based contrastive linguistics and typology. More specifically, we build a diachronic parallel corpus of psalm translations and compare the contexts in which auxiliaries and inflectional alternatives are used in these parallel texts by means of multidimensional scaling. Our historical comparative method results in five proximity maps which allow us to explore and compare the inventory of verb constructions of the Wachtendonck Psalter both retrospectively, with its source text in Latin, and prospectively, with later translations in Dutch. Our analysis examines the role of grammaticalization as well as the specific nature of the text as an interlinear translation as possible motivations for the presence and absence of auxiliaries in the Wachtendonck Psalter

History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics and language evolution · Medieval Literature and History

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access