Hanne Martine Eckhoff

Grammatical Profiles and Aspect in Old Church Slavonic

We employ a new empirical approach to an enduring controversy concerning the development of a system of imperfective vs. perfective verbs in Slavic. While scholars once claimed that this is an ancient inherited system, dating from the prehistoric era, most now believe that the Slavic aspect-pair system is an innovation. Different opinions concerning the date of this innovation range from the time of the earliest Slavic texts to the late middle ages. We use two different statistical models to sort Old Church Slavonic data from the PROIEL corpus and compare the results to distributions of verb forms in modern Russian. This comparison shows that there are indeed differences among verbs in Old Church Slavonic that suggest a division into imperfective vs. perfective verbs, although this division is clearly not identical to the division found in modern Russian.

Breaking down and putting back together: analysis and synthesis of New Testament Greek

In this paper we first briefly describe the design of a corpus containing the Koine Greek original text of the New Testament and its translations in to Gothic, Latin, Old Church Slavic and Armenian. We then discuss extensively the annotation that we have applied in each layer of annotation: morphology and syntax, information structure, animacy, and token alignment. For each type of annotation we provide some preliminary results and applications that draw on it, often in combination with other layers of annotation.

Old Russian possessive constructions : a construction grammar approach

This book is a detailed study of the possessive semantic space within the framework of construction grammar. Using corpus data from Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian, the book uses semantic maps to document the relationship between form and meaning in a set of semantically closely related adnominal possessive constructions, and to trace their diachronic development.

A Source of Variation: A Corpus-Based Study of the Choice between APO and EK in the NT Greek Gospels

Using a quantitative methodology based on extensively annotated corpus data from the PROIEL corpus, we examine the distribution of απο and ek in the NT Greek Gospels. The original semantic opposition between these two prepositions in terms of an ablative-elative distinction started fading during the historical development of Greek and has been argued to be already much weaker at the time of the New Testament. To explore this we generate a semantic map without semantic pre-analysis on the basis of four parallel language samples. We then use statistical techniques to interpret this map. We ind that there is still a fairly clean separation between ek and απο largely based on semantic role. However, απο is quite frequently used in elative contexts. A lexical analysis clarifies that the use of απο in this environment amounts to the preposition specialising with certain lexical items, some of them with variable interpretations, as seen in the case of toponyms.

The PROIEL treebank family: a standard for early attestations of Indo-European languages

This article describes a family of dependency treebanks of early attestations of Indo-European languages originating in the parallel treebank built by the members of the project pragmatic resources in old Indo-European languages. The treebanks all share a set of open-source software tools, including a web annotation interface, and a set of annotation schemes and guidelines developed especially for the project languages. The treebanks use an enriched dependency grammar scheme complemented by detailed morphological tags, which have proved sufficient to give detailed descriptions of these richly inflected languages, and which have been easy to adapt to new languages. We describe the tools and annotation schemes and discuss some challenges posed by the various languages that have been annotated. We also discuss problems with tokenisation, sentence division and lemmatisation, commonly encountered in ancient and mediaeval texts, and challenges associated with low levels of standardisation and ongoing morphological and syntactic change.