Syntactically annotated corpora are highly important for enabling large-scale diachronic and diatopic language research. Such corpora have recently been developed for a variety of historical languages, or are still under development. One of those under development is the fully tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG), which is aimed at facilitating research into the highly under-researched diachronic syntax of Low German. The present paper reports on a crucial step in creating the corpus, viz. the creation of a part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German (MLG). Having been transmitted in several non-standardised written varieties, MLG poses a challenge to standard POS taggers, which usually rely on normalized spelling. We outline the major issues faced in the creation of the tagger and present our solutions to them.

In spite of growing interest in recent years, the syntax of Middle Low German (MLG) remains an extremely underresearched area. In light of recent research showing early North West Germanic languages to be partial null subject languages (Axel 2005; Walkden 2014; Kinn 2016; Volodina/Weiss 2016), the question arises where MLG is positioned in this respect. The present article presents novel data showing that MLG had referential null subjects (RNS) and can be classified as a partial null subject language. Based on a quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis of their syntactic distribution, we argue that two types of RNS must be distinguished in MLG, null topics in SpecCP and null clitics on C.

A crosslinguistic survey of the expression of polarity emphasis reveals that some such expressions are subject to the distributional constraints typical of main clause phenomena, while others are not. The former have received a fairly homogeneous syntactic analysis, implicating specific left peripheral projections. The non-restricted variety, however, is not analysed uniformly with some phenomena receiving a fully syntactic account and others being accounted for in terms of semantics and pragmatics. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The aim of the present paper is to study and account for the scopal interaction between modal verbs and sentential negation in historical Low German. A number of proposals concerning the scope of negation in clauses with modal verbs for other languages (mainly English) will be evaluated against the empirical findings from historical Low German. It will be argued that syntactic accounts of this interaction are not empirically adequate, and that a lexical account will have to be complemented by a pragmatic one in order to account for the behaviour and development of some modal verbs.

The present paper consists of two parts. We first show that the Flemish preverbal morpheme en in negative sentences differs from superficially similar items in other languages such as French both in terms of distribution and in terms of interpretation: Flemish en is dependent on finite Tense and conveys contrastive focus on the negative polarity of the clause. In the second part of the paper, we develop a new syntactic analysis of en and argue that although en syntactically encodes (low) focus, the contrastive effects associated with it are pragmatically inferred through the interaction of the focal interpretation with the discourse context. That is, we conclude that focus and contrast can be dissociated and that not all expressions of contrast are syntacticized. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Based on a comparative corpus study, the present paper contrasts conditionals containing the modal verbs sollte in German, should in English, and mocht/moest in Dutch. The conditionals are examined with respect to the linkage levels between protasis and apodosis, the tense/mood patterns in the two clauses, and the degree of syntactic integration of the protasis into the apodosis. We argue that sollte, should, mocht, and moest are undergoing a process of grammaticalization as markers of conditionality, understood as upwards reanalysis in the hierarchy of functional projections. We show that this grammaticalization process is at different stages in the different languages, not showing any sandwich-like pattern.