The evolution of relative clauses in the IcePaHC treebank

AbstractWe examine how the elements that introduce relative clauses, namely relative complementizers and relative pronouns, evolve over the history of Icelandic using the phrase structure analysis of the IcePaHC treebank. The rate of these elements changes over time and, in the case of relative pronouns, is subject to effects of genre and the type of gap in the relative clause in question. Our paper is a digital humanities study of historical linguistics which would not be possible without a parsed corpus that spans all centuries involved in the change. We relate our findings to studies on the Constant Rate Effect by analyzing these effects in detail.