Querying a Dozen Corpora and a Thousand Years with Fintan

Large-scale diachronic corpus studies covering longer time periods are difficult if more than one corpus are to be consulted and, as a result, different formats and annotation schemas need to be processed and queried in a uniform, comparable and replicable manner. We describes the application of the Flexible Integrated Transformation and Annotation eNgineering (Fintan) platform for studying word order in German using syntactically annotated corpora that represent its entire written history. Focusing on nominal dative and accusative arguments, this study hints at two major phases in the development of scrambling in modern German. Against more recent assumptions, it supports the traditional view that word order flexibility decreased over time, but it also indicates that this was a relatively sharp transition in Early New High German. The successful case study demonstrates the potential of Fintan and the underlying LLOD technology for historical linguistics, linguistic typology and corpus linguistics. The technological contribution of this paper is to demonstrate the applicability of Fintan for querying across heterogeneously annotated corpora, as previously, it had only been applied for transformation tasks. With its focus on quantitative analysis, Fintan is a natural complement for existing multi-layer technologies that focus on query and exploration.