Parameter theory on historical corpora: Measuring the power of parameter setting theory on historical corpora. Validato 14/05/2024 II grado (Vidau)

A central question in linguistics is to explain the tension between the universal nature of the human language faculty and the observed diversity of its empirical instantiations.Various proposals try to solve this tension relying on the notion of parameters, i.e. binary options allowing for cross-linguistic structural variation (Chomsky 1981, 2005; Roberts 2007; Biberauer 2019). The implementation of parameter theories incurs into two major problems: they usually resort to ungrammaticality judgments, a kind of evidence language acquirers do not have access to, and they leave unexplored the procedure behind parameter setting. This project embraces these challenges by measuring the power of parametric models through an innovative method, i.e. the application of parameter theories to historical corpora, which qualify as an ideal testing ground, since they contain continuous texts, which can be taken as a proxy for the primary linguistic data used by language acquirers. We test the list of nominal parameters and their setting procedure proposed in Crisma/Guardiano/Longobardi (2020) on the Old Italian corpus which will be finalized during the project. The procedure will be replicated on the syntactically annotated corpora of Early New High German, Historical Icelandic and Old and Middle English, which conform to the UPenn-style conventions and allow for automated searches of syntactic constituents, constructions and processes. This project will offer an innovative contribution to the logical problem of language acquisition, the architecture of parameter systems and nominal syntax. Once validated on positive evidence and historical corpora, our parameter setting procedure will be able to bridge the gap between descriptive and explanatory adequacy. Also, by comparing Old Italian and historical Germanic with modern varieties, we will provide a principled characterization of the attested nominal structures in relation with their possible diachronic developments. In addition, we will highlight how the correlation and competition between structures can be traced back to the intricate network of dependencies among parameters. Furthermore, we will enlarge the list of nominal parameters by including a full characterization of the syntax of relative clauses. Last but not least, we will release a syntactically annotated corpus of Old Italian, free of charge and fully compatible with the UPenn-style treebank corpora of other historical languages.

A central question in linguistics is to explain the tension between the universal nature of the human language faculty and the observed diversity of its empirical instantiations.Various proposals try to solve this tension relying on the notion of parameters, i.e. binary options allowing for cross-linguistic structural variation (Chomsky 1981, 2005; Roberts 2007; Biberauer 2019). The implementation of parameter theories incurs into two major problems: they usually resort to ungrammaticality judgments, a kind of evidence language acquirers do not have access to, and they leave unexplored the procedure behind parameter setting. This project embraces these challenges by measuring the power of parametric models through an innovative method, i.e. the application of parameter theories to historical corpora, which qualify as an ideal testing ground, since they contain continuous texts, which can be taken as a proxy for the primary linguistic data used by language acquirers. We test the list of nominal parameters and their setting procedure proposed in Crisma/Guardiano/Longobardi (2020) on the Old Italian corpus which will be finalized during the project. The procedure will be replicated on the syntactically annotated corpora of Early New High German, Historical Icelandic and Old and Middle English, which conform to the UPenn-style conventions and allow for automated searches of syntactic constituents, constructions and processes. This project will offer an innovative contribution to the logical problem of language acquisition, the architecture of parameter systems and nominal syntax. Once validated on positive evidence and historical corpora, our parameter setting procedure will be able to bridge the gap between descriptive and explanatory adequacy. Also, by comparing Old Italian and historical Germanic with modern varieties, we will provide a principled characterization of the attested nominal structures in relation with their possible diachronic developments. In addition, we will highlight how the correlation and competition between structures can be traced back to the intricate network of dependencies among parameters. Furthermore, we will enlarge the list of nominal parameters by including a full characterization of the syntax of relative clauses. Last but not least, we will release a syntactically annotated corpus of Old Italian, free of charge and fully compatible with the UPenn-style treebank corpora of other historical languages.