2005 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
The development of a Perl-based search system in a syntactically-annotated corpus of Old English and the analysis of the search result
| Project/Area Number |
16520305
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
English linguistics
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| Research Institution | Nihon University |
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Principal Investigator |
HOSAKA Michio Nihon University, College of Humanities and Sciences, Professor, 文理学部, 教授 (10229164)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2004 – 2005
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| Keywords | Old English / Corpus / Perl / Syntactic Change / Reflexive Pronoun / Unaccusative |
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| Research Abstract |
The aim of this study is to search The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE) using my own Perl scripts and to analyze the syntactic structures of Old English on the basis of my search result.
This two-year study project began in 2004. For the first year, I looked over the grammatical tags in YCOE and figured out a way to search the files in YCOE using my Perl scripts. For the second year, I inquired into some aspects of syntactic change during the Old English period, especially, the development of reflexive pronouns and unaccusative constructions. I will outline the result of both studies below.
First, as for the development of reflexive pronouns, there were two types of reflexive pronouns in Old English. One of them is simple pronominal forms and the other is SELF forms. During the early and mid Old English periods, the simple pronominal forms were mainly used as a reflexive, but in the late Old English period, the number of the SELF forms began to increase gradually. I descriptively showed how the change was. The result of this study appeared in Bunpoka-Aratana tenkai- edited by Minoji Akimoto and Michio Hosaka.
Secondly, as for the development of unaccusative constructions, on the basis of the search result of YCOE, I argued that unaccusative constructions were closed related with reflexive pronouns in Old English. Then I concluded that unaccusative constructions lost their roles in the syntax of Present-day English because the system of morphological license ceased working with the loss of simple pronominal forms as a reflexive. The result of this study was presented at the First International Conference of the Society of Historical English Language and Literature in Japan held at the University of Chiba, in September, 2005 and at the Annual Conference of the English Studies Association of Nihon University held in December, 2005.
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Research Products
(3 results)
