This study provides an account of the puzzling difference in case marking of the object of two-argument verbs like aider (accusative) and ob & eacute;ir (dative) in French. Cross-linguistically, these two verb types usually mark their object identically (e.g., accusative in English, dative in German), but French historically shows divergent trajectories. Employing logistic regression modelling and clustering techniques, this corpus-based study examines 77 verbs over 1000 years of textual record to show that aider-type verbs and ob & eacute;ir-type verbs systematically diverge in their case selection by the 16th century and that they have been stable ever since. We argue that their trajectories reflect the narrowing of an oblique linking rule, defined in terms of Talmy's theory of force dynamics, which targets the difference between helping and hindering verbs on the one hand and verbs of reacting and resisting on the other. The analysis dispels long-held views that the diachronic changes were random or based strictly on analogy, and methodologically, it provides an empirical basis for connecting historical change to developmental approaches to grammar. Cette & eacute;tude propose une analyse de la diff & eacute;rence intrigante dans le marquage casuel de l'objet de verbes & agrave; deux arguments tels que aider (accusatif) et ob & eacute;ir (datif) en fran & ccedil;ais. & Agrave; travers les langues, ces deux types de verbes marquent g & eacute;n & eacute;ralement leur objet de mani & egrave;re identique (par exemple, l'accusatif en anglais, le datif en allemand), mais le fran & ccedil;ais pr & eacute;sente historiquement des trajectoires divergentes. & Agrave; l'aide de mod & egrave;les de r & eacute;gression logistique et de techniques de regroupement (clustering), cette analyse de corpus examine 77 verbes sur une p & eacute;riode de 1000 ans, d & eacute;montrant que les verbes du type aider et ceux du type ob & eacute;ir se diff & eacute;rencient syst & eacute;matiquement dans leur s & eacute;lection casuelle & agrave; partir du 16e si & egrave;cle, stabilisant ensuite leur usage. Nous soutenons que ces trajectoires refl & egrave;tent le r & eacute;tr & eacute;cissement d'une r & egrave;gle d'association, d & eacute;finie en termes de la th & eacute;orie de la dynamique des forces de Talmy, qui cible la distinction entre les verbes d'assistance et d'emp & ecirc;chement d'une part, et les verbes de r & eacute;action et de r & eacute;sistance d'autre part. Cette analyse r & eacute;fute l'id & eacute;e r & eacute;pandue selon laquelle ces changements diachroniques & eacute;taient al & eacute;atoires ou strictement fond & eacute;s sur l'analogie et, sur le plan m & eacute;thodologique, elle offre une base empirique pour relier les changements historiques aux approches d & eacute;veloppementales de la grammaire.

This contribution covers two aspects of Applied Linguistics: the role of linguistic theory in building historical corpora and the use of corpus data for the validation of historical linguistic theories. The state of the art will focus more on corpus linguistic principles than on particular corpora, tools or languages, and more on (morpho)syntax than on other linguistic levels. With examples taken mainly from French, we present a typical workflow for historical corpora and discuss publications on language change that are based on Historical Corpus Linguistics.

Cette contribution aborde le problème de l’hétérogénéité formelle des corpus syntaxiquement annotés pour l’histoire du français. La première partie décrit le problème. La deuxième partie en propose une solution. Elle présente les corpus historiques qui sont disponibles actuellement et explique les différences majeures concernant l’annotation syntaxique et le modèle grammatical. Elle propose une méthode qui permet d’unifier et d’analyser les deux types d’annotation malgré leur différence. La troisième partie est une esquisse d’application. Elle montre comment les données unifiées peuvent être exploitées. Une quatrième partie présente en annexe les ressources et les outils développés pour la mise en œuvre de cette méthode.

Historical dictionaries of the pre-digital period are important resources for the study of older languages. On the example of the Altfranzosisches Worterbuch, an Old French dictionary published from 1925 onwards, this contribution shows how the printed dictionaries can be turned into a more easily accessible and more sustainable lexical database, even though a full-text retro-conversion is too costly. Over 57,000 German sense definitions were identified in uncorrected OCR output. For verbs and nouns, 34,000 senses of more than 20,000 lemmas were matched with GermaNet, a semantic network for German, and, in a second step, linked to synsets of the English WordNet. These results are relevant for the automatic processing of Old French, for the annotation and exploitation of Old French text corpora, and for the philological study of Old French in general.

Abstract In this paper we present data showing that the development of the English recipient passive (RP) was linked predominantly to verbs of French origin, although Old French (OF) did not have an RP. We present two explanations of the role that contact with French could have played in this development. The first explanation builds on the fact that only structurally case-marked arguments can become subjects of passive clauses and assumes that the RP was developed with French verbs because the OF structural dative was copied to Middle English (ME). The second explanation is that clause-taking ditransitive verbs in Anglo-French (AF, the variety of OF spoken in England) showed case idiosyncracies that licensed the RP in AF and may thus have acted as a bridge construction. We relate both explanations to current approaches in contact linguistics as well as to the degrees of stability of the three languages involved, ME, OF, and AF.

Abstract This contribution analyses the role French may have played as a model language in the development of the indirect passive (or recipient passive) in Middle English. It is based on diachronic corpus data showing that the construction appeared in Middle English predominantly with verbs borrowed from French and spread to native verbs only later. The fact that French did not have a recipient passive construction speaks against contact influence, whereas the data as well as the situation of close language contact between Old French and Middle English speak in favour of contact-induced change. The hypothesis of internal change will be contrasted with several explanations in a language contact scenario. The first one is syntactic and regards the type of dative case : English integrated the French structural dative into its native grammar, which so far only had an inherent dative. Passives with structural datives were prior to native constructions and may have triggered them. The transfer may have been facilitated by the reanalysis of certain bridge constructions (proclitics and clausal complements). The more conceptual second part discusses current psycholinguistic research in order to identify methods which help overcome the methodological deadlock that historical linguists are facing when they want to assess the validity of competing explanations.

This contribution analyses the role French may have played as a model language in the development of the indirect passive (or recipient passive) in Middle English. It is based on diachronic corpus data showing that the construction appeared in Middle English predominantly with verbs borrowed from French and spread to native verbs only later. The fact that French did not have a recipient passive construction speaks against contact influence, whereas the data as well as the situation of close language contact between Old French and Middle English speak in favour of contact-induced change. The hypothesis of internal change will be contrasted with several explanations in a language contact scenario. The first one is syntactic and regards the type of dative case : English integrated the French structural dative into its native grammar, which so far only had an inherent dative. Passives with structural datives were prior to native constructions and may have triggered them. The transfer may have been facilitated by the reanalysis of certain bridge constructions (proclitics and clausal complements). The more conceptual second part discusses current psycholinguistic research in order to identify methods which help overcome the methodological deadlock that historical linguists are facing when they want to assess the validity of competing explanations.

This paper investigates contact-induced changes in the argument structure of Middle English verbs on the model of Old French. 1 We study two issues: i) to what extent did the English system retain and integrate the argument structure of verbs copied from French? ii) did the argument structure of these copied verbs influence the argument structure of native verbs? Our study is based on empirical evidence from Middle English corpora as well as a full text analysis of the Ayenbite of Inwyt and focusses on a number of verbs governing a dative in French. In the first part of the paper we define the contact situation and relate it to Johanson's (2002) model of code copying. In the second part we comment on Allen's (1995) study of please and some other psych verbs and corroborate her assumptions that i) semantic similarity triggered change within the set of these verbs, and ii) this change has reflexes in the syntactic realisation of the dative argument as a prepositional phrase. We propose a method to identify contact-induced change beyond the verb class originally affected. More explicitly, based on further empirical evidence, we show that the argument structure of the native verb give, a transfer of possession verb, was also affected by these changes and that these effects are stronger in texts that are directly influenced by French.

In this paper we present data showing that the development of the English recipient passive ( RP) was linked predominantly to verbs of French origin, although Old French (OF) did not have an RP. We present two explanations of the role that contact with French could have played in this development. The first explanation builds on the fact that only structurally case-marked arguments can become subjects of passive clauses and assumes that the RP was developed with French verbs because the OF structural dative was copied to Middle English (ME). The second explanation is that clause-taking ditransitive verbs in Anglo-French ( AF, the variety of OF spoken in England) showed case idiosyncracies that licensed the RP in AF and may thus have acted as a bridge construction. We relate both explanations to current approaches in contact linguistics as well as to the degrees of stability of the three languages involved, ME, OF, and AF.

This chapter discusses results from a quantitative study of possible contact-induced change in Middle English in a multi-genre corpus (the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English 2 (PPCME2), Kroch & Taylor 2000, and a single-genre corpus, the Penn Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC), Taylor et al. 2006). We claim that the data from the correspondence corpus are critical to understanding the rise of the recipient passive (more traditionally called the indirect passive) in late ME because they reflect the active competence of writers, much more than other genres do (at least in the PPCME2). More precisely, we argue that our data reflect a verb class specific passive construction that seems to be firmly established in the grammar of the writers. This construction is not calqued from the model language (Old French) but the result of interpreting the French dative as different from the English 'dative'.

Abstract This paper addresses the question of whether certain types of cleft constructions found in earlier stages of English can be interpreted as instances of pragmatic borrowing from French. According to Prince (1988) this type of borrowing can be assumed if (i) a syntactic form in the recipient language is construed in an analogous fashion to a syntactic form in the source language; (ii) the discourse functions of the syntactic form in the source language are borrowed and associated with the syntactic form in the recipient language. Based on a corpus study of Anglo-French (AF) and Middle English (ME) we will show that both languages exhibited a number of different types of cleft constructions some of which seem to have had similar, and some seem to have had different functions. By identifying the nature of clefts in AF as being ambiguous between clefts and predicative constructions, we will discuss in how far this ambiguity could be seen as an accelerating factor of contact-induced change leading to pragmatic borrowing into ME.