Linguistics 300, F13, Assignment 2

The exercises in this assignment introduce you to the Penn Historical Corpora of English (PPCHE) by having you search a subset of them using web-based queries. The program that carries out the searches is a state-of-the-art tree query language called CorpusSearch that was developed at Penn to support research on parsed historical corpora.

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In what follows, the terms new grammar and old grammar refer to the grammars that generate negated sentences with and without do support, respectively. In present-day English, do support is obligatory in negated sentences, and the main verb appears in uninflected form in a structural position that is lower than the position of do. In older forms of English, the main verb in inflected form occupies the same higher structural position as auxiliary do. The standard way of relating the two variants in syntactic theory is to say that in the old grammar, the main verb moves from the lower position (shown in gray below) to the higher position. This movement is known as verb raising.

New grammar (do support, no verb raising): He does not speak Mandarin.
Old grammar (verb raising, no do support): He speaks not speaks Mandarin.

Assignment

Complete all of the questions below, but submit written answers only for Questions 3 and 7-11.

  1. How many negated sentences are there in Modern British English with the new grammar?
    • The search domain for the tree you build should be IP-MAT*.
    • The root of the query tree should also be IP-MAT*.
    • The root should iDom (immediately dominate) three branches, DOD|DOP, NEG, and VB.
    • The order among the three branches should be ordinary precede (>).

    Once the search is complete, you can review the individual sentence tokens. Summary statistics appear at the bottom of the output. Here and in what follows, focus on the hits and disregard the tokens and total. See hits/tokens/total for detailed discussion of how to interpret the summary statistics, but the assignment doesn't require you to do so.

  2. How many negated sentences are there in Modern British English with the old grammar?
    • Once again, the search domain and root for the tree you build should be IP-MAT*.
    • This time, the root should iDom (immediately dominate) two branches, VBD|VBP and NEG.
    • The order between the two branches should be ordinary precede (>).

  3. Review the output of Queries 1 and 2. Does the output of Query 2 contain tokens of the old grammar that are grammatical in present-day English? Are there any verbs or verb classes that seem to favor the old grammar? Are there any other hits that do not correspond to what you expected?

  4. What is the overall percentage of the new grammar in Modern British English?

  5. Does the percentage of the new grammar rise between the 1700s and the 1800s/1900s? (In view of the paucity of texts from the 1900s, collapse them with those from the 1800s.)

    • The file names for the Modern English British texts all contain their date.

  6. Repeat the first two searches on the Middle English and Early Modern English corpora.

  7. When does the new grammar enter the language (in other words, when are the first examples of the new grammar attested)?

    • The file names for the Middle English and Early Modern English texts contain references to their time period as follows:
      Middle English: M1 (1150-1249), M2 (1250-1349), M3 (1350-1419), M4 (1420-1499)
      Early Modern English: E1 (1500-1569), E2 (1570-1639), E3 (1640-1712)

  8. Track the rise of the new grammar for the four periods of Middle English, the three periods of Early Modern English, and the two periods of Modern British English that you already have results for (that is, the 1700s and the 1800s/1900s).

  9. In present-day English, be undergoes obligatory verb raising and never appears with do support. What is the situation in the historical corpora?
    • For this search, replace VB, VBD, and VBP in the appropriate search trees with BE, BED, and BEP, respectively.
  10. Repeat the previous exercise for auxiliary have.
    • For this search, replace VB, VBD, and VBP in the appropriate search trees with HV, HVD, and HVP, respectively.
    • In order to restrict the search to auxiliary have (excluding main verb have), add PART (= participle) as a daughter of IP-MAT*.
    • The order between the auxiliary and PART should be ordinary precede (>).

  11. In American English, main verb have behaves like other main verbs with respect to do support (They don't have a car vs. *They have not a car). The situation in present-day British English is complex, but it has been claimed that this variety continues to allow verb raising with main verb have. What is the situation in the historical corpora?
    • As in the immediately preceding search, use HV, HVD, and HVP.
    • In order to restrict the search to main verb have (excluding auxiliary have), add NOT_PART as a daughter of IP-MAT*. (This excludes sentences with participles from the search.)

  12. Are there any instances of the new grammar with modals (MD)?
    Example: I didn't can/could come.

  13. Are there any instances of negation without either verb raising or do support?
    Example: He not came.