Decomposing Decomposition in Time

Our chair has been awarded a DFG-funded project to work on decompositional adverbials („Decomposing Decomposition in Time“) which has already started to fund several students. The project began work on July 1, 2021. (Abstract)

We are creating a layer of semantic annotations on top of a syntactically annotated corpora. This diachronic data covers all of English language history: from Old English to around 1900 (YCOE [1], PPCHE [2]). The natural language phenomena we are annotating for are decompositional items (e.g. again, almost).

With an exhaustive semantic annotation aligned with a syntactic annotation we close empirical gaps and increase the resolution in the empirical basis for the investigation of decompositionality at the syntax-semantics interface. Our annotations are context-based and multiply annotated.

The finished product of our project will consist of a standoff annotation layer and an alignment tool (Python 3.x) (along with the appropriate ‘quick-start’ documentation). The goal is to allow users align their own purchased versions of the PPCHE corpora with our semantic annotations.

[1] https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang22/YCOE/YcoeHome.htm

[2] https://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/