HeidelGram – Corpus and Network Analysis of the Discourses of English Grammars from 1550 to 1900
Final Report Abstract
By using a systematically compiled, representative annotated 10-million-word corpus of British English grammars from 1550-1900, the HeidelGram project is a pioneer in investigating the changing as well as the stable discourses of historical English grammar writing from a synchronic and diachronic corpus-based perspective. Thus far, this period of 450 years has been investigated from the perspective of smaller periods or individual centuries, such as the 18th and 19th centuries or with a focus on specific features such as, use of the progressive aspect to show national superiority. The project innovatively integrates the interdisciplinary combination of corpus-linguistic and network-analytic methods to be a fruitful approach for examining, assessing, and visualising the evaluative discursive practices before 20th-century historical English grammar writing. This integrative approach enables even more specificity than previous work on historical discourse studies because we can look at the data at different points in time, leading to a truly diachronic project. The project approaches this topic through the investigation of three major strands, which are operationalised through the following three networks: I. the network of grammars and grammarians, II. the network of evaluative terms associated with verbal hygiene, III. the network of lexemes referring to grammatical phenomena. In the first network, the HeidelGram project explores how and why grammarians describe how language is and ought to be used and refer to influential figures at the time. The use of network analysis allows us to identify key individuals that are central to the network such as notable ancient, political, literary, or contemporary figures being referenced, and to measure the relationships between entities. For instance, grammarians referring not only to ancient scholars and building upon their schools of thought, but also to a variety of other figures including their contemporaries, depicts the versatility of language change and how it is shaped by various philosophies and ideologies. Secondly, the HeidelGram project analyses which evaluative strategies were used over time to address diverse linguistic topics (e.g. philology, semantics, etc.) and grammatical concepts (e.g. tense, aspect, declination, etc.). This includes the investigation of established assumptions about the interplay between the development of historical English language norms and language usage, as well as the attitudes of historical authors to English descriptivism and prescriptivism. Thirdly, the project diachronically investigates which linguistic concepts are referred to and in what way in the course of historical grammar writing. Furthermore, it is of interest how the concepts themselves and their descriptions change or remain stable in diachrony.
Publications
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HeidelGram. A Corpus of English Grammar Books between 1550 and 1900
Busse, B., Gather, K. & Kleiber, I.
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Assessing the Connections between English Grammarians of the Nineteenth Century: A Corpus-Based Network Analysis. In Eric Fuß, Marek Konopka, Beata Trawiński, & Ulrich H. Waßner (Eds.), Grammar and Corpora 2016 (pp. 435–442). Heidelberg University Publishing.
Busse, B., Gather, K. & Kleiber, I.
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Paradigm shifts in 19th-century British grammar writing. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 49-72. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Busse, Beatrix; Gather, Kirsten & Kleiber, Ingo
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A corpus-based analysis of grammarians’ references in 19th-century British grammars. Variation in Time and Space, 133-172. De Gruyter.
Busse, Beatrix; Gather, Kirsten & Kleiber, Ingo
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A Corpus-Based Network Analysis of 16th-Century British Grammar Writing. CL2021, Limerick, Ireland
Busse, B., Kleiber, I., Dumrukcic, N. & Du Bois, S.
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Crossing the Boundary of Time: Fine-Tuning Modern NLP Models for Specialized Historical Corpus Data. ICAME42, Dortmund, Germany
Busse, B., Kleiber, I., Dumrukcic, N. & Du Bois, S.
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Diachronic Analysis of Grammatical Forms and Functions in a Corpus of 16th- to 19th-Century English Grammar Books. ICAME43, Cambridge, UK
Busse, B., Dumrukcic, N., Du Bois, S. & Kleiber, I.
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A Corpus-Based Analysis of Onomastic References in 18th-Century American Grammars. ICAME44. Vanderbijlpark, South Africa
Du Bois, S.
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Corpus-Based Network Analysis of Onomastic References in 17th-Century Grammar Writing. ISLE7, Brisbane, Australia
Busse, B., Dumrukcic, N., Du Bois, S. & Kleiber, I.
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Onomastic Referencing Strategies in a Corpus of 17th-Century Grammars of English. ICAME45, Vigo, Spain.
Busse, B., Dumrukcic, N. & Du Bois, S.
