Visualizing Language Change : Dative Subjects in Icelandic

Abstract

This paper presents a visualization tool for the analysis of diachronic multidimensional language data. Our tool was developed with respect to a corpus study of dative subjects in Icelandic based on the Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus (Wallenberg et al., 2011) which investigates determining factors for the appearance of dative subjects in the history of Icelandic. The visualization provides an interactive access to the underlying multidimensional data and significantly facilitates the analysis of the complex diachronic interactions of factors at hand. We were able to identify various interactions of conditioning factors for dative subjects in Icelandic via the visualization tool and showed that dative subjects are increasingly associated with experiencer arguments in Icelandic across time. We also found that the rise of dative subjects with experiencer arguments is correlated with an increasing use of middle voice. This lexical semantic change argues against dative subjects as a Proto Indo-European inheritance. Moreover, the visualization helped us to draw conclusions about uncertainties and problems of our lexical semantic data annotation which will be revised for future work.