Abstract
Certain phenomena of interest to linguists mainly occur in low-resource languages, such as contact-induced language change. We show that it is possible to study contact-induced language change computationally in a historical variety of a low-resource language, Early-Modern Frisian, by creating a model using features that were established to be relevant in a closely related language, modern Dutch. This allows us to test two hypotheses on two types of language contact that may have taken place between Frisian and Dutch during this time. Our model shows that Frisian verb cluster word orders are associated with different context features than Dutch verb orders, supporting the ‘learned borrowing’ hypothesis.- Anthology ID:
- W19-4733
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Florence, Italy
- Venue:
- LChange
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 265–271
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W19-4733
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W19-4733
- Cite (ACL):
- Jelke Bloem, Arjen Versloot, and Fred Weerman. 2019. Modeling a Historical Variety of a Low-Resource Language: Language Contact Effects in the Verbal Cluster of Early-Modern Frisian. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 265–271, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Modeling a Historical Variety of a Low-Resource Language: Language Contact Effects in the Verbal Cluster of Early-Modern Frisian (Bloem et al., LChange 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/W19-4733.pdf