Abstract
This pilot study conducts a corpus-based, bottom-up analysis of both intertextual and areal variation in Old High German and Old Saxon. The aim is to break through the circularity of former analyses of these texts by using a bottom-up approach and capturing variation in a strictly data-driven approach. For this, the orthography of the 111 most frequent lemmata of Old High German and Old Saxon, as compiled in the Deutsch Diachron Digital corpus (DDD), serves as a basis. Using this corpus, the paper first determines to what extent texts are structurally more similar and dissimilar. Subsequently, the variation captured through these texts is visualized in the form of maps of the Old High German and Old Saxon language area. From a philological point of view, this provides an empirically reliable spatial classification of the early language history of German for the first time;from a methodological point of view, the study is a litmus test for the applicability of quantitative methods to historical corpora.
Item Type: | Journal article |
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Faculties: | Languages and Literatures > Department 2 |
Subjects: | 400 Language > 400 Language |
ISSN: | 0344-8169 |
Language: | German |
Item ID: | 110552 |
Date Deposited: | 02. Apr 2024, 07:18 |
Last Modified: | 02. Apr 2024, 07:18 |