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The advent of Early Modern Dutch (starting ∼1550) marked significant developments in language use in the Netherlands. Examples include the loss of the case marking system, the loss of negative particles and the introduction of new vocabulary. These developments typically lead to a lot of variation both within and between language users. Linguistics research aims to characterize and account for such variation patterns. Due to sparseness of digital resources and tools, research is still dependent on traditional, qualitative analysis. This paper describes an ongoing effort to increase the amount of tools and resources, exploring two different routes: (i) modernization of historical language and (ii) adding linguistic and sociolinguistic annotations to historical language directly. This paper discusses and compares the experimental setup, and preliminary results of these two routes and provides an outlook on the envisioned linguistic and sociolinguistic research approach.

Despite many years of research on Swedish language technology, there is still no well-documented standard for Swedish word processing covering the whole spectrum from low-level tokenization to morphological analysis and disambiguation. SWORD is a new initiative within the SWE-CLARIN consortium aiming to develop documented standards for Swedish word processing. In this paper, we report on a pilot study of Swedish tokenization, where we compare the output of six different tokenizers on four different text types. For one text type (Wikipedia articles), we also compare to the tokenization produced by six manual annotators. SWE-CLARIN

This paper presents psycholinguistic evidence on the factors governing the resolution of German personal pronouns. To determine the relative influence of linear order versus grammatical function of potential antecedents, two interpretation-preference tasks were designed. Their specific aim was to disentangle salience factors conflated in previous research on pronoun interpretation, such as linear or-der, first mention and topicalization. Experiment 1 tested pronoun resolution to non-sentence-initial position (scrambling) and Experiment 2 tested pronoun resolution to sentence-initial position (topicalization). The results across different verb types and across different syntactic contexts in Experiments 1 and 2 show that grammatical function, yet neither linear order, first mention nor topicalization predicts pronoun resolution in German., ZAS Papers in Linguistics, Bd. 48 (2007): Intersentential pronominal reference in child and adult language: proceedings of the Conference on Intersentential Pronominal Reference in Child and Adult Language, December 1-2, 2006, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin

Dutch allows for variation as to whether the first position in the sentence is occupied by the subject or by some other constituent, such as the direct object. In particular situations, however, this commonly observed variation in word order is ‘frozen’ and only the subject appears in first position. We hypothesize that this partial freezing of word order in Dutch can be explained from the dependence of the speaker’s choice of word order on the hearer’s interpretation of this word order. A formal model of this interaction between the speaker’s perspective and the hearer’s perspective is presented in terms of bidirectional Optimality Theory. Empirical predictions of this model regarding the interaction between word order and definiteness are confirmed by a quantitative corpus study., Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe, 625

A pragmatic theory of the approximate vs. precise interpretation of round number words such as one hundred vs. ninety-seven is developed that improves on the previous account of Krifka (2002) insofar as it does not postulate a general bias for approximate interpretations. It is shown that under a speaker preference for number expressions that are short and/or refer to cognitively salient values on scales, approximate interpretations are favored for these expressions even if there is no general bias for them. Also, it is shown that there is a general tendency for values on coarse-grained scales to be denoted by shorter expressions, which can be seen as evidence of optimization of language. Finally, evidence is discussed that speakers may preferentially select those messages for which an ecomomic code is available.