Open AccessStudying word order differences in a historical parallel corpus: An example from Old Spanish and Old Portuguese
Author(s) -
Kristine Gunn Eide
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
oslo studies in language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1890-9639
DOI - 10.5617/osla.693
Subject(s) - word order , portuguese , syntax , linguistics , object (grammar) , computer science , word (group theory) , subject (documents) , natural language processing , information structure , brazilian portuguese , artificial intelligence , order (exchange) , philosophy , finance , library science , economics
In this article, I use a parallel corpus from the 13th and 14th century to tease out some of the structural differences that existed between Old Spanish and Old Portuguese. While these two related languages were relatively similar in many respects, and the parallel corpus reflects these similarities, differences in syntax and information structure are also apparent. By comparing the syntactic and information structural properties of the sentences that display different word orders, it is possible to pinpoint more exactly what these differences were. The parallel sentences show that information structural properties of the left periphery, where Spanish allows for new information where Portuguese does not, account for differences in both object and subject placement.