The interplay between genre variation and syntax in a historical Low German corpus
Melissa Farasyn, George Walkden, Sheila Watts, Anne Breitbarth · Studies in corpus linguistics · 2018
Abstract In this chapter, we focus on the choice of different genres in the Middle Low German part of the tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German and its implications for syntax. We discuss how the inclusion or exclusion of genres has an impact on the study and the discovery of syntactic phenomena in Middle Low German, such as null referential subjects, resumptive pronouns, relative particles and gaps in coordinations. This interplay between genre and syntax also influences parsing decisions. Furthermore, we look at the influence of (sparse) punctuation on (automatically) tagging the corpus itself, and how a closer study of genre-specific syntactic elements contributes to the improvement of the accuracy of automatic classifiers.