Word families in diachrony (WoDia) - A research environment for the historical word formation of German

• Applicants: Dr. Thomas Burch; Professor Dr. Jost Gippert; Dr. Sarah Ihden; Dr. Ralf Plate; Professorin Dr. Ingrid Schröder
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 524625420

The "Word families in diachrony" project aims to provide a database-driven online research environment as an instrument for research and teaching, which will embed the Old High German, Middle High German, Old Saxon and Middle Low German vocabularies in an overarching word family structure allowing to determine for each word ist place in ist word family using a hierarchical structural formula. The basis is the vocabulary of the reference dictionaries of the historical varieties which is to be linked with the online resources of the dictionaries (dictionary articles, collections of documents) and with the corresponding reference corpora (Old German, Middle High German and Middle Low German / Low Rhenish). WoDia will enable the investigation of processes of change in the historical vocabulary of German in ist entirety by focusing on the changes in word families (expansion, dismantling, reconstruction) and the use of the individual means of word formation. Studies on the development of word families (dissertations) integrated into the project will firstly show how the essential components of language development (word formation, borrowing) manifest themselves in word family structures and how formal and semantic ambiguity (e.g. of affixes) is reflected in processes of language change. Secondly, the example of composition will be used to discuss what role categorical vagueness plays in the analysis and how it affects the interpretation of the linguistic data. Thirdly, the studies will enable an evaluation of the research environment by examining two families of words. For each lemma, the database will contain the assignment to a word family as well as a structural formula which maps the individual word formation elements and the word formation hierarchy. The etymologically corresponding lemmas and word families of the different stages of German will be linked so that an analysis across the varieties will also be possible. The annotations in the word family database (e.g. concerning the word structure) will be supplemented by their lemmas being linked with the online materials of the dictionaries and with the reference corpora, building upon various types of information from these resources (contexts, textual assignment, diasystematic classification). The word family database will be searchable online with the help of a (graphical) user interface, e.g. for lemmas of a part of speech with a selected prefix in a certain variety of German. For the query results, different representations will be provided, e.g. a lemma and word family list with the associated annotations (both for the individual varieties and across them), but also interactive visualizations. The research environment will be hosted by the Kompetenzzentrum - Trier Center for Digital Humanities. The digitized versions of the underlying dictionaries that were not previously available online will also be published online in the Trier dictionary network (Wörterbuchnetz).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants