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

TL;DR

The work addresses how Early Slavic participle clauses function and compete with jegda-when clauses, aiming to explain their distribution through a two-pronged approach. The first part uses corpus-based annotation across morphosyntactic, dependency, information-structural, and lexical levels, with parallel Ancient Greek data to infer functional distinctions; the second part analyzes cross-linguistic typology using massively parallel data (mayer-cysouw) to map the semantic space of English when onto the Early Slavic context, generating probabilistic semantic maps and applying Kriging, Gaussian Mixture Modeling, and precision/recall analyses. A token-based typology and SDRT-inspired discourse framework underpin the analysis, enabling a granular, gradient understanding of competition among participle constructions and jegda-clauses. The study aims to advance our understanding of temporal constructions by disentangling compositional semantics from discourse-pragmatic factors and offering cross-linguistic generalizations about how languages express the WHEN space, with implications for historical linguistics and typology.

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.