A quantitative and typological study of Early Slavic participle clauses and their competition

TL;DR

This thesis conducts a corpus-based, quantitative, and typological analysis of Early Slavic participle clauses and their finite counterparts, examining their functions, distribution, and cross-linguistic variation in expressing temporal semantics.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed morphosyntactic and semantic analysis of Early Slavic participle constructions and compares their semantic scope with English 'when' through parallel data and statistical modeling.

Findings

Identifies functional roles of participle clauses in Early Slavic.

Analyzes distribution patterns of participle vs. finite clauses.

Maps semantic variation of 'when' across languages.

Abstract

This thesis is a corpus-based, quantitative, and typological analysis of the functions of Early Slavic participle constructions and their finite competitors ($jegda$-'when'-clauses). The first part leverages detailed linguistic annotation on Early Slavic corpora at the morphosyntactic, dependency, information-structural, and lexical levels to obtain indirect evidence for different potential functions of participle clauses and their main finite competitor and understand the roles of compositionality and default discourse reasoning as explanations for the distribution of participle constructions and $jegda$-clauses in the corpus. The second part uses massively parallel data to analyze typological variation in how languages express the semantic space of English $when$, whose scope encompasses that of Early Slavic participle constructions and $jegda$-clauses. Probabilistic semantic maps are generated and statistical methods (including Kriging, Gaussian Mixture Modelling, precision and recall analysis) are used to induce cross-linguistically salient dimensions from the parallel corpus and to study conceptual variation within the semantic space of the hypothetical concept WHEN.