This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support an eighteen-month research fellowship by Dr. Joel C. Wallenberg to work with Dr. Hoskuldur Thrainsson at the University of Iceland.
This collaboration continues an in-depth study of a number of intricate grammatical constructions in modern Icelandic, as well as a detailed comparison of the grammar of Icelandic and English throughout their written histories. The 18 month project has the following three primary goals: to conduct a series of experiments with speakers of Icelandic focusing on a selection of scientifically important grammatical constructions, the collection and syntactic annotation of a database (?corpus?) of modern and historical Icelandic texts, and a detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of the experimental and written data. The project investigates central questions of natural language syntax and language evolution through a study of modern and historical English and Icelandic. These two languages are similar enough to allow for a detailed comparison, but yet differ in important and interesting ways. While the project includes a broad comparison of historical Icelandic and English, it focuses primarily on phenomena of modern Icelandic that have already been shown to exist in historical English as well, particularly ?object shift? or ?scrambling? (Wallenberg 2007, 2008) and ?quantifier movement? (Light & Wallenberg 2008). Both of these phenomena show a degree of optionality for speakers in both languages, as well as limits on this optionality due to general grammatical constraints. Both phenomena have also followed different historical trajectories in the two languages under investigation.
The construction of a diachronic corpus of Icelandic creates a permanent, public resource for quantitative and replicable studies of language variation and change over time. The investigation of internal and external factors in language stability and language change sheds light on how children acquire language, how the human language faculty processes statistical inputs from the population of speakers, and brings more data to bear on the relationship between the dynamics of language evolution and the dynamics of biological evolution (cf. e.g. Nowak 2006: Chapt. 13). Furthermore, experimentation in the computational methods necessary to annotate such a corpus could further advance general research in natural language processing (cf. part-of-speech-tagging Icelandic in Dredze & Wallenberg 2008a, 2008b). Finally, in addition to potential scientific gains, the profound language contact between English and the Scandinavian languages in England, Ireland, and Scotland during the medieval period points to a shared cultural history between American English and modern Icelandic, the details of which will be much better understood after a thorough comparison of the early English and Icelandic grammatical systems.
