Paul Bennett, Martin Durrell,

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• Paul Bennett, Martin Durrell,
• Silke Scheible, Jason Whitt
• The GerManC Project
• A Representative Corpus of Early Modern German
• (1650-1800)

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(No Transcript)
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Representativeness

• Not complete texts, but extracts of approximately
  2000 words (cf. Brown corpora and ARCHER)
• Nine genres
• Dramas
• Newspapers
• Letters
• Sermons
• Narrative prose
• Journals
• Scholarly texts (humanities)
• Scholarly texts (science medicine)
• Legal texts

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Representativeness

• Periods (cf. Bonn corpus of ENHG)
• 1650-1700 1700-1750 1750-1800
• Regions
• North German
• West Central German
• East Central German
• West Upper German (incl.Swiss)
• East Upper German (incl. Austrian)
• Three extracts of 2000 words per
  genre/period/region
• approx. 900.000 words

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Pilot Project GerManC

• One year grant from ESRC
• March 2006 - March 2007
• Team
• Paul Bennett, Martin Durrell, Astrid Ensslin
• Aim testing corpus design and aims with a single
  genre, and evaluating and developing a set of
  analytical tools
• Newspapers were selected as genre for the pilot

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Breslau 1683
Wien 1780
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Digitization

1. Scanning black letter (Fraktur) texts with OCR
   proved impractical and prone to error
2. All texts keyed in twice and the results compared
   electronically (double-keying) to eliminate
   mistakes
3. Only texts with 2000 words of (more or less)
   continuous German prose were selected

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Extended GerManC

• Pilot project completed March 2007. Newspaper
  corpus lodged with Oxford Text Archive (and
  available on project website)
• Application for funding the extended corpus
  approved early 2008, with equal funding from
  ESRC and AHRC
• Original design maintained, eight further genres
  to be added
• Team Paul Bennett, Martin Durrell, Silke
  Scheible, Jason Whitt
• Work started in September 2008

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Development of tools

• A capable program for tokenization
• A program to recognize orthographic variants
• A lemmatization program with the ultimate aim of
  lemmatizing the whole corpus
• The development of an appropriate POS-tagger (on
  the basis of the Stuttgart-Tübingen Tagset) with
  a view to tagging the complete corpus
• Developing a program to enable automatic
  morphosyntactic tagging of the whole corpus
• If possible within the time constraints,
  developing a parser (possibly on the basis of the
  parser used in York for Old English) and parsing
  the complete corpus on this basis.

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Changing norms

• Innerhalb der nach grammatischem Bestimmungswort
  zu erwartenden indet. Flexion des Nom./Akk.Pl.
  aller Genera (die klugen Frauen) kommt es zu
  allen Zeiten des Fnhd. zu einer zwischen -(e) und
  -(e)n schwankenden Formbildung
• Gramm. d. Fnhd. VI, 174

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Findings weak adjective inflection 1
(newspapers)

• process of standardization
• weak adjective inflection (Durrell et al. 2008)
  in nom./acc. pl.,
• e.g. die guten Kinder (die Guten)

1650-1700 1650-1700 1701-1750 1701-1750 1751-1800 1751-1800
-e -en -e -en -e -en
North German 20 (6) 6 (5) 6 33 (16) 1 32 (14)
West Central 45 (18) 4 (3) 18 (4) 10 (5) 3 28 (6)
East Central 7 (2) 18 (11) 7 18 (3) 2 31 (5)
West Upper 25 (7) 6 (3) 16 (3) 6 (2) 16 (3) 16 (8)
East Upper 38 (22) 14 (11) 24 (3) 11 (8) 3 34 (5)
Total 135 (55) 48 (33) 71 (10) 78 (34) 25 (3) 141 (38)
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Changing norms

• Die Entwicklung vom späten 16. Jh. bis zur Mitte
  des 18. Jhs. erweist die Durchsetzung von -en
  als die Verallgemeinerung eines in erster Linie
  omd. Usus. Die ... stilschichtliche
  Distribution bestätigt die Einschätzung bei
  Hemmer ..., daß -n über literarische
  Sprachvorbilder übernommen worden ist.
• (Gramm d. Fnhd. 176)

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Findings weak adjective inflection 2(literary
genres)

• Preliminary examples from drama and narrative
  prose in new extended corpus

1650-1700 1650-1700 1701-1750 1701-1750 1751-1800 1751-1800
-e -en -e -en -e -en
North German 2 19 (2) 7 (2) 23 (7) 0 25 (7)
West Central 2 19 (7) 6 (1) 14 (5) 6 8 (1)
East Central 2 24 (3) 1 (1) 23 (4) 0 17 (3)
West Upper 5 0 0 3 (1) 3 (1) 21 (5)
East Upper 2 11 (2) 5 (1) 3 (1) 3 (1) 14 (2)
Total 13 73 (14) 19 (5) 78 (34) 12 (2) 85 (18)
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Morphological simplification zwei

• Bei den Grammatikern ist bis in die 2. Hälfte
  des 18. Jh. hinein die Genusdifferenzierung
  aufrechterhalten (Schottel, Bödiker, Gottsched)
  Erst Adelung (a. 1782) gibt ausschließlich die
  Form zwey für alle Genera. (Gramm. d. Fnhd. VII,
  539)

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Morphological simplification zwei

• Am frühesten ist das Neutrum als Einheitsform
  festgeworden im Niederdeutschen 1303. Im
  Ostmitteldeutschen (Obersächsischen und
  Schlesischen) herrscht es seit der Mitte des 17.
  Jhs. und drang von dort auch in die
  Literatursprache (Schirmunski, Deutsche
  Mundartkunde, 474).

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• zwei in newspaper corpus

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Morphological simplification zwei

• In newspapers occasional gender forms in those
  areas where they occur in the dialects,
  especially WCG and, notably, Erfurt 1769. zween
  in newspapers only before 1700, thereafter
  sporadic. Only one text (Frankfurt 1671)
  consistently maintains gender distinction

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1650-1700 1650-1700 1650-1700 1700-1750 1700-1750 1700-1750 1750-1800 1750-1800 1750-1800
zween zwo zwei zween zwo zwei zween zwo zwei
North German 2 2 2 1 7 5 2 8
West Central German 3 1 13 1 1 6 2 15
East Central German 2 3 1 20 1 15
West Upper German 1 4 2 11 1 1 3
East Upper German 3 13 5 1 7
zwei in extended corpus to date
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Morphological simplification zwei

• In other texts zwei/zwey are dominant throughout,
  but other forms occur sporadically, even in the
  North. But Herder Abhandlung über den Ursprung
  der Sprache (North German 1772) uses the gender
  forms - but not consistently correctly (e.g.
  zwey Parteien)

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Historical/cultural findings

• Media history
• Ensslin (2009), Im Unterhause groß Getöse
  representations of 18th century British
  parliamentary democracy in Early Modern German
  newspaper discourse
• The representation of a parliamentary monarchy in
  17th 18th century Germany, with predominantly
  absolute rulers - but responding to increased
  interest in Britain ruled by the Hannoverians
• Initially straightforward factual presentations,
  concise and apparently objective, though with
  (intentional?) emphasis on the leading role of
  the king
• Later clear tendency towards stigmatization of
  the raucous debates in the House of Commons,
  with a much more subjective style of presentation
  and often sensationalist tone

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Erfurt 1744
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• (Freyburgerzeitung, 28 January 1784)
• Die Veränderungen des neuen Ministeriums machen
  im Unterhause abscheulich groß Getöse. Dieß
  Ministerium hat wirklich schon die herrlichsten
  Namen aufgeheftet gekriegt einige schelten
  selbes die kleine Pastetengebäckadministrazion,
  andere, die Bildsäule Nabukadnezars. Pitt, der
  nun an der Stelle des Fox ist, ist ein Gegenstand
  des öffentlichen Spottes scheelsüchtiger
  Satyriker.

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Thank you

• Contacts Martin.Durrell_at_manchester.ac.uk
• Paul.Bennett_at_manchester.ac.uk
• Silke.Scheible_at_manchester.ac.uk
• Richard.Whitt_at_manchester.ac.uk
• Web page
• http//www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/research/projects/
  germanc/

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Project publications

• Martin Durrell, Astrid Ensslin and Paul Bennett,
  "The GerManC project", In Sprache und
  Datenverarbeitung 31 (2007), 71-80.
• Martin Durrell, Astrid Ensslin und Paul Bennett,
  "Zur Standardisierung der Adjektivflexion im
  Deutschen im 18. Jahrhundert". In W. Czachur and
  M. Czyzewska (eds.), Vom Wort zum Text. Studien
  zur deutschen Sprache und Kultur. Festschrift für
  Professor Józef Wiktorowicz zum 65. Geburtstag.
  Warszawa, Instytut Germanistyki Uniwersitetu
  Warszawskiego, 2008, pp. 259-267.
• Martin Durrell, Astrid Ensslin und Paul Bennett,
  "Zeitungen und Sprachausgleich im 17. und 18.
  Jahrhundert. In Zeitschrift für deutsche
  Philologie 127 (2008), Sonderheft, pp. 263-279
• Ensslin, Astrid (2008), '"Im Unterhause
  abscheulich groß Getöse". Representations of 18th
  century British parliamentary democracy in early
  modern German newspaper discourse and their
  treatment of borrowings from English'. In
  Pfalzgraf, F. Rash, F. (eds.), "Anglo-German
  Literary Relations". Bern, etc. Lang, pp. 73-96.