The article is a systematic, corpus-based account of Latin’s influence on the position Old English (OE) adnominal adjectives. While multiple studies phrase-level syntax suggest that source-text interference may have been partly responsible for placing adjective after head noun, this observation has so far received little quantitative underpinning. present offers detailed comparison OE target no...

Infinitives have been studied from a variety of perspectives, one of which is the fact that they may behave as nouns and verbs (Hernanz 1999). Although they usually act as either one or the other, there is one particular class of infinitives (Eventive Infinitives, EI) which exhibits at the same time noun and verb behaviour. As nouns, they can be combined with determiners and adjectives –that ag...

There is much interest in using large corpora to explore predictors of the probability of higher level linguistic structures, but suitable corpora are not available for all languages and their varieties. We explore a task that uses discourse contexts from an existing corpus as prompts for sentence completion to investigate the usefulness of the method for generating data as a proxy for unavaila...

Thanks are due to the Institute of the Czech National Corpus and to the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences which kindly provided the data source for this paper. I also wish to thank Denisa Lenertová and the audiences of the Potsdam Workshop on Heterogenity in Linguistic Databases and of the 13th JungslavistInnen-Treffen for discussion, and the editors for their frie...

The goals of this paper are twofold. First, I provide empirical generalizations regarding paradigmatic gaps in the Russian genitive plurals. Second, I propose an analysis of these facts in terms of inviolable lexical conservatism conditions. The main idea behind Lexical Conservatism is that speakers are hesitant introducing forms that would create a new allomorph of an existent morpheme. I reje...

‘Gradient grammar’ (Bresnan & Hay 2006) refers to statistical theories of language competence. A number of studies (Bod et al. 2003, Bresnan et al. 2005, Gries 2007, O’Connor et al. 2004, Snider & Zaenen 2006, Wasow & Arnold 2005, among others) have explored such probabilistic variation where speakers choose among grammatical options (dative and genitive alternations, complementizer optionality...