The evolution of relative clauses in the IcePaHC treebank

Anton Ingason, Johanna Mechler


Abstract
We examine how the elements that introduce relative clauses, namely relative complementizers and relative pronouns, evolve over the history of Icelandic using the phrase structure analysis of the IcePaHC treebank. The rate of these elements changes over time and, in the case of relative pronouns, is subject to effects of genre and the type of gap in the relative clause in question. Our paper is a digital humanities study of historical linguistics which would not be possible without a parsed corpus that spans all centuries involved in the change. We relate our findings to studies on the Constant Rate Effect by analyzing these effects in detail.
Anthology ID:
2025.nlp4dh-1.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, USA
Editors:
Mika Hämäläinen, Emily Öhman, Yuri Bizzoni, So Miyagawa, Khalid Alnajjar
Venues:
NLP4DH | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
202–208
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.nlp4dh-1.17/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anton Ingason and Johanna Mechler. 2025. The evolution of relative clauses in the IcePaHC treebank. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities, pages 202–208, Albuquerque, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The evolution of relative clauses in the IcePaHC treebank (Ingason & Mechler, NLP4DH 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.nlp4dh-1.17.pdf