Modeling a Historical Variety of a Low-Resource Language: Language Contact Effects in the Verbal Cluster of Early-Modern Frisian

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, EarlyModern 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.

[1]  Baden Hughes,et al.  Frontiers in Linguistic Annotation for Lower-Density Languages , 2006 .

[2]  David Basilico.  Noun Incorporation in Frisian , 2016 .

[3]  Anders Søgaard.  Data point selection for cross-language adaptation of dependency parsers , 2011, ACL.

[4]  Jelke Bloem,et al.  Testing the Processing Hypothesis of word order variation using a probabilistic language model , 2016, CL4LC@COLING 2016.

[5]  Tjeerd de Graaf,et al.  The use of new technologies in the preservation of an endangered language: The case of Frisian. , 2015 .

[6]  L.D.H. Dros,et al.  Not another book on Verb Raising , 2018 .

[7]  Evie Coussé,et al.  Motivaties voor volgordevariatie : een diachrone studie van werkwoordvolgorde in het Nederlands , 2008 .

[8]  Uriel Weinreich,et al.  Languages in Contact: French, German and Romansh in twentieth-century Switzerland , 2011 .

[9]  Jelske Dijkstra,et al.  FRYSS: A FIRST STEP TOWARDS FRISIAN TTS 1 , 2005 .

[10]  Alderik H. Blom.  Language Admixture in the Old West Frisian , 2007 .

[11]  Sampo Pyysalo,et al.  Universal Dependencies v1: A Multilingual Treebank Collection , 2016, LREC.

[12]  G.M.M. Coupé,et al.  Syntactic extension. The historical development of Dutch verb clusters , 2015 .

[13]  P. Breuker.  West Frisian in Language Contact , 2001 .

[14]  Fred Weerman,et al.  Cracking the cluster: The acquisition of verb raising in Dutch , 2016 .

[15]  A.P.J. van den Bosch,et al.  Oersetter: Frisian-Dutch statistical machine translation , 2014 .

[16]  J. Ytsma.  Frisian as first and second language: sociolinguistic and socio-psychological aspects of the acquisition of Frisian among Frisian and Dutch primary school children , 1995 .

[17]  F. Weerman.  Diachronic change: Early versus late acquisition , 2011, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.

[18]  Hermann Collitz,et al.  Phonology and grammar of modern west Frisian , 1913 .

[19]  Fei Xia,et al.  Multilingual Structural Projection across Interlinear Text , 2007, HLT-NAACL.

[20]  Arjen Versloot,et al.  Verbal cluster order and processing complexity , 2017 .

[21]  E. Hoekstra.  Reade wurdfolchoarders en dêrmei gearhingjende aspekten yn 17e-ieusk Frysk. In ûndersyk nei de tiidwurdkloft yn Gysbert Japicx syn "Yen suwnerlinge forhânlinge Fen it Libben In fenne Deade" , 2012 .

[22]  Kristin L. Sainani,et al.  Logistic Regression , 2014, PM & R : the journal of injury, function, and rehabilitation.

[23]  J. Harkins.  Review of Labov, William (1994) Principles of linguistic change, Volume 1: Internal factors , 1996 .

[24]  ROLF H. BREMMER.  Bad Frisian and bad Low German: Interference in the writings of a medieval West Frisian , 1997 .

[25]  Liesbeth Augustinus.  Complement Raising and Cluster Formation in Dutch. A Treebank-supported Investigation. , 2015 .

[26]  Michaela Regneri,et al.  SeedLing: Building and Using a Seed corpus for the Human Language Project , 2014 .

[27]  Willem Visser,et al.  Studies in West Frisian Grammar. Selected papers by Germen J. de Haan , 2010 .

[28]  Pieter Duijff,et al.  Lexicography in a Minority Language: A Multifunctional Online Dutch-Frisian Dictionary , 2018 .

[29]  David A. van Leeuwen,et al.  Investigating Bilingual Deep Neural Networks for Automatic Recognition of Code-switching Frisian Speech , 2016, SLTU.

[30]  Germen J. de Haan,et al.  Chapter 13. Recent changes in the verbal complex of Frisian , 2010 .

[31]  Sjef Barbiers,et al.  Syntactische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten Deel II / Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects Volume II , 2008 .

[32]  Veronique Hoste,et al.  An automatic part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German , 2017 .

[33]  Steven Bird,et al.  The Human Language Project: Building a Universal Corpus of the World's Languages , 2010, ACL.

[34]  Andreas Dufter,et al.  Towards a multivariate model of grammar: The case of word order variation in Dutch clause final verb clusters , 2009 .

[35]  J. Hajic.  Applying automatically parsed corpora to the study of language variation , 2014 .