Corpora and Historical Linguistics
Investigating language change through corpora and databases
Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg i.Br. (Germany)
September 11th-13th, 2003

The description and explanation of diachronic language change requires the examination, analysis and comparison of texts and linguistic evidence that come from very different periods, genres, registers and traditions of speaking. The 2nd Freiburg Workshop on Romance Corpus Linguistics was dedicated to the question how the methods and techniques of modern corpus linguistics can be put to use in order to investigate historical language change and which innovative insights may result from the application of corpus linguistic methods in the field of historical linguistics.

Language change was considered, in this context, on different levels: as long-term change that modifies profoundly the language(s) involved, even altering its (their) typologic structure, which for an adequate corpus-linguistic treatment requires databases with an important diachronic depth and which include evidence that comes inevitably from written sources only; and as middle- and short-term change, that emerges already from the comparison of very few text or speaker generations and for which the constitution of corpora with reduced diachronic depth is sufficient; corpora that, if focussing on recent stages of language change, may embrace written- and spoken-language data in all their conceptional manifestations.

85 linguists from 17 countries worldwide participated at this conference, where, apart from 47 panel contributions, the following plenary talks were given:

• Marisol López Martínez (Centro de Investigacións Ramón Piñeiro + Instituto da Lingua Galega, Santiago de Compostela / Spain):
  El Corpus del Gallego Actual (CORGA). Problemas de configuración y anotación
• Christiane Marchello-Nizia (ENS LSH Lyon + CNRS Paris / France):
  Pour une linguistique historique 'outillée'
• Ana Maria Martins (Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa / Portugal):
  Passive and impersonal se in the history of Portuguese
• Dieter Wanner (Ohio State University, Columbus / USA):
  Data ex machina: searching for explanations in Spanish diachrony

Furthermore, a para-workshop Corpus historiques - balisage, étiquetage, exploitation, directed by Sophie Prévost (ENS Ulm + CNRS Paris / France) and Serge Heiden (ENS-LSH Lyon / France), was organized within the conference, where the machine-readable treatment and mark-up of historical texts and diachronic language data was exemplified, illustrated and discussed.

The workshop was organized in cooperation with
and sponsored by
	Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Bonn
	Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg - Rektorat / International Office
	Freiburg Wirtschaft und Touristik GmbH
	Sparkasse Freiburg-Nördlicher Breisgau
	Gunter Narr Publisher Tübingen