B02
Emergence and change of registers: The case of Lithuanian and Latvian
This project ends with the first funding phase at the end of 2023.
The project investigates the emergence and development of registers by examining the beginning of written transmission in Lithuanian and Latvian, two closely related languages in which register questions have not been investigated before. We focus on the two pre-eminent pioneers of the new literary languages, Johannes Bretke (1536–1602) for Old Lithuanian and Georg Mancelius (1593–1654) for Old Latvian, whose works attest a range of text types where intra-individual variation can be observed – postils (collections of pericopes and homilies) figuring prominently among these. Crucial is the interaction with (a) the written languages that provided translation sources and (b) the languages spoken in the multi-lingual environment. The following research questions arise: (i) How do registers emerge, and to what extent do individual authors create them? (ii) How can the influence of loan registers be evaluated? (iii) How can the influence of source languages within a multi-lingual setting be identified? (iv) How do established registers change over time?
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Publications & Presentations
Vanhala, Otso; Thies, Felix (2023) The grammatically annotated corpus of the pericopes of the Old Lithuanian Postil of Jonas Bretkūnas[DOI] [ViVo] This grammatically annoted corpus aims at facilitating linguistic research on Old Lithuanian based on the Postil of Jonas Bretkūnas from the year 1591. The corpus is divided into two subcorpora, "pericopes" and "homilies" to make register related research easier.
The pericopes were annotated using SIL Toolbox and converted to be used in the search-tool ANNIS using the conversion tool PEPPER.
Three formats are provided in this release: 1. the Toolbox files, 2. the transitional Excel files and 3. a zipped folder to be imported into ANNIS.
Created in the project B02, Emergence and change of registers: The case of Lithuanian and Latvian of the CRC 1412 "Register" (funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: DFG, German Research Foundation: 416591334).
Goymann, Frank (2023) A Grammatically Annotated Corpus of the Old Latvian Postil of Georg Mancelius[DOI] [ViVo] This grammatically annoted corpus aims at facilitating linguistic research on Old Latvian based on the Postil of Georg Mancelius from the year 1654. The corpus is divided into two subcorpora, "pericopes" and "homilies" to make register related research easier.
The pericopes were annotated using SIL Toolbox and converted to be used in the search-tool ANNIS using the conversion tool PEPPER.
Three formats are provided in this release: 1. the Toolbox files, 2. the transitional Excel files and 3. a zipped folder to be imported into ANNIS.
Created in the project B02, Emergence and change of registers: The case of Lithuanian and Latvian of the CRC 1412 "Register" (funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: DFG, German Research Foundation: 416591334).
Lehmann, Nico; Serova, Dina; Lukassek, Julia; Döring, Sophia; Goymann, Frank; Lüdeling, Anke; Akbari, Roodabeh (2023) Guidelines for the annotation of parameters of narration. In: REALIS: Register Aspects of Language in Situation [DOI] [ViVo] The present guidelines describe the annotation of narrative phenomena on the clause level, using a combination of ideas and methods from linguistics and lit- erary studies. The main categories marking the discourse strategy “narration” in stretches of text have been narrowed down to mediacy, i. e. involving a narrator, and sequentiality of events. This document specifies how to define mediacy, and in turn determine whether a narrator is present, as well as how to identify events and their sequential ordering. Lastly, a functional layer annotation is proposed which allows researchers to compare different types of narrative instances. This offers a basis for investigating a potential narrative register which is said to be important for many kinds of register studies.Vanhala, Otso (2023) Momentaneous derived verbs in Vilentas’s texts In: Linguistica Lettica [ViVo] As the first part of the analysis of deverbal verb derivation in the Prussian Lithuanian texts up to the 17th century, I investigated the relationship between the prefixed momentaneous verbs in the Gospels and Epistles and in the Catechism of Baltramiejus Vilentas. Based on an empirical study of the verbs in their contexts, I allocated each verb under investigation into the Vendler (1957) classes (state, activity, achievement, accomplishment) and annotated the verbs by valency. After this, I compared the momentaneous derived verbs with their attested unprefixed base verbs which mostly are of the mixed type. Morphologically, it turns out that the mixed verbs are to be seen as primary and not as derivatives as the formant (-ė- or -o-) of the infinitive stem might suggest since there are no attested primary verbs without the formant, e.g. *mokti, *moksta. The prefixed momentaneous verbs have the infix/sta-formant in the present stem, the prefix in all stems, and additionally no suffix in the infinitive stem in contrast to their base verbs.
Semantically, the base verbs are in the activity and state classes, and their derivatives in the achievement class. By this comparison, the derived achievement verbs are allocated into the class of momentaneous (including ingressives and terminatives) aktionsart, derived from their activity and state base verbs.Schütz, Johannes (2023) ToolboxTools[ViVo] This project provides tools to read and write files in the Toolbox format.
Goymann, Frank; Schütz, Johannes (2023) Perfekt und Nebensätze im Altlettischen In: Linguistica Lettica [ViVo] This article analyzes the emergence of functional variation of language in the early stages of the old Baltic languages as a part of the ongoing research of functional variation of the DFG-funded project CRC 1412 “Register”. It will be described how language usage varies according to the communicative goals and function of a text and shown that texts with two different functions can be found in the postils that were used in the Christianization process of the Baltic countries in the 16th and 17th century. Using the Lang=gewünschte Lettische Postil of Georg Mancelius, it will be shown that functionally motivated variation in the usage of the perfect and in the usage of forms of the preteritit active participle without an auxiliary in subordinate sentences can be found in the Old Latvian language.Vanhala, Otso (2022) Verbal derived stems and semantics in prefixed verbs in the earliest Lithuanian texts In: Lietuvių kalba [ViVo] This article discusses the deverbal verb derivation by the means of the prefixes in the Old Lithuanian language based on the data of about 110 primary verbs and their approximately 460 derivates attested in the Gospels and Epistles (ViE) and the Catechism (ViC) of Baltramiejus Vilentas, with additional data from other contemporary sources.
By comparing the derived verbs with their bases occurring in the texts, the co-occurring morphological and semantical changes were found out. Attention is brought on the together occurring morphological and semantical changes used in deriving telic verbs from their often atelic bases, e.g. the loss infinitive formants -ė-, and -o-, as in giedoti “to sing”→ pragysti “to start to sing, to start to crow”, or the ablaut change in šaukti “to shout” → prašukti “to cry out, to exclaim”. The change in telicity can be used to classify the derived verbs into aktionsart classes (e.g. ingressive, delimitative). The telic ingressive and momentaneous derivatives also have the nasal infix or sta formant in the present tense.
It is shown that the non-prefixed verbs with ingressive or momentaneous meaning of the type gysti occur extremely rarely in the oldest Lithuanian texts, and are better seen as later de-prefixed derivatives of the type pragysti. Similarly, the derived type pragiedoti is rare in Old Lithuanian as the prefixation is usually accompanied by the shortening of the infinitive stems in the derivatives of this semantic class, leading to pragysti, although the type pragiedoti also occurs. This has led to the formal patterning of the derivatives and base verbs into two new models similar to that of degti → sudegti: gysti → pragysti and giedoti → pragiedoti.Feulner, Anna Helene (2021) Luther und die Register der altlitauischen Glaubensverkündigung In: Luthers Deutsch in Mittel- und Osteuropa [ViVo] Lüdeling, Anke; Alexiadou, Artemis; Adli, Aria; Donhauser, Karin; Dreyer, Malte; Egg, Markus; Feulner, Anna Helene; Gagarina, Natalia; Hock, Wolfgang; Jannedy, Stefanie; Kammerzell, Frank; Knoeferle, Pia; Krause, Thomas; Krifka, Manfred; Kutscher, Silvia; Lütke, Beate; McFadden, Thomas; Meyer, Roland; Mooshammer, Christine; Müller, Stefan; Maquate, Katja; Norde, Muriel; Sauerland, Uli; Szucsich, Luka; Verhoeven, Elisabeth; Waltereit, Richard; Wolfsgruber, Anne; Zeige, Lars Erik (2020) Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation In: REALIS: Register Aspects of Language in Situation [DOI] [ViVo] The Collaborative Research Center 1412 “Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412) investigates the role of register in language, focusing in particular on what constitutes a language user’s register knowledge and which situational-functional factors determine a user’s choices. The following paper is an extract from the frame text of the proposal for the CRC 1412, which was submitted to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2019, followed by a successful onsite evaluation that took place in 2019. The CRC 1412 then started its work on January 1, 2020. The theoretical part of the frame text gives an extensive overview of the theoretical and empirical perspectives on register knowledge from the viewpoint of 2019. Due to the high collaborative effort of all PIs involved, the frame text is unique in its scope on register research, encompassing register-relevant aspects from variationist approaches, psycholinguistics, grammatical theory, acquisition theory, historical linguistics, phonology, phonetics, typology, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics, as well as qualitative and quantitative modeling. Although our positions and hypotheses since its submission have developed further, the frame text is still a vital resource as a compilation of state-of-the-art register research and a documentation of the start of the CRC 1412. The theoretical part without administrative components therefore presents an ideal starter publication to kick off the CRC’s publication series REALIS. For an overview of the projects and more information on the CRC, see https://sfb1412.hu-berlin.de/.Vanhala, Otso (2022) Verbal derived stems and semantics in prefixed verbs in the earliest Lithuanian texts In: Third Pranas Skardžius Memorial Conference [ViVo] Goymann, Frank; Schütz, Johannes (2021) Partizipien und Nebensätze im Altlettischen In: XIII International Congress of Balticists [ViVo] Vanhala, Otso (2021) Verbal derivation patterns in the writings of Vilentas In: XIII International Congress of Balticists [ViVo]
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