Ling-Lunch returns this week at its usual time with a talk by Igor.
Speaker: Igor Yanovich (MIT)
Title: Modal hopes and fears: a diachronic case study
Date/Time: Thursday, Feb 23, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461
In this talk, I will show what the history of English modals in CP complements of one semantic class of attitude verbs can tell us about the mechanics of semantic change. Data for the study come from two historical corpora of English (covering the time periods of 1425-1520, and 1640-1680, respectively), each of size >350K words, drawn from the Penn Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence. The talk will include of brief tutorial on the use of Penn parsed corpora.