Corpus Linguistics, Treebanks and the Reinvention of Philology

The fields of corpus and computational linguistics address fundamental goals – and challenge us to rethink the structure – of humanistic research. All work with historical languages is, in some sense, an exercise in corpus linguistics. The Greek and Latin Treebanks illustrate changes in intellectual practice. Linguistic annotation of historical corpora serves a different community and offers a different combination of challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, historical languages such as Greek and Latin have, by definition, no native speakers. At the same time, these corpora have been, and remain, objects of intensive study. The Greek and Latin Treebanks thus have spawned three areas of activity, each of which differs from what we find in corpus linguistics and which collectively constitute a new form of intellectual activity, one that draws upon both the most traditional goals of philology and upon emerging fields such as corpus and computational linguistics.