Thomas T. Field UMBC (Baltimore, MD 21250-0001)
FB-50145-04
Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars
Research Programs
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[Grant products]
Totals:
$40,000 (approved) $40,000 (awarded)
Grant period:
7/1/2005 – 6/30/2006
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Linguistic Corpus of Medieval Gascon
The diachronic study of the grammar of Gascon, a nearly untouched field, has the potential of helping to resolve a number of issues in Romance and general linguistics. However, the researcher who wishes to work on the language today has difficulty in accessing the written texts that remain to us from earlier periods. Many have never been published. Those that did appear in print were often published in local French journals that are virtually inaccessible today. Without these texts, particularly the medieval documents, the historical linguistics of Gascon lacks a solid foundation for empirical research. This project proposes the development of a digital corpus of texts in Gascon from the twelfth century to the beginning of the sixteenth century. Prepared in XML format according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative and with the verbs tagged for tense/aspect/mood, etc., these documents will be usable in multiple ways, across media and on all systems, including the web. The corpus thus constituted will be a foundation for multiple studies of change in the grammar of Gascon.
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