Corpus Analysis based on Structural Phenomena in Texts: Exploiting TEI Encoding for Linguistic Research

Corpus Analysis based on Structural Phenomena in Texts: Exploiting TEI Encoding for Linguistic Research Susanne Haaf Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) Jägerstr. 22/23, 10117 Berlin E-mail: haaf@bbaw.de Abstract This paper poses the question, how linguistic corpus-based research may be enriched by the exploitation of conceptual text structures and layout as provided via TEI annotation. Examples for possible areas of research and usage scenarios are provided based on the German historical corpus of the Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA) project, which has been consistently tagged accordant to the TEI Guidelines, more specifically to the DTA ›Base Format‹ (DTABf). The paper shows that by including TEI-XML structuring in cor- pus-based analyses significances can be observed for different linguistic phenomena, as e.g. the development of conceptual text structures themselves, the syntactic embedding of terms in certain conceptual text structures, and phenomena of language change which become obvious via the layout of a text. The exemplary study carried out here shows some of the potential for the exploitation of TEI annotation for linguistic research, which might be kept in mind when making design decisions for new corpora. Keywords: Corpus Linguistics, Corpus Analysis, Annotation, TEI Structures, Historical Linguistics 1 Introduction The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) started off with the goal to provide scholarly projects and libraries with an annotation format that would help “facilitate the creation, exchange, and integration of textual data in ma- chine-readable form, for all kinds of texts, in every human language, from every historical or social context.” (Burnard 2013: 5). Indeed, as of today, the TEI Guidelines (2016) have become a de facto standard for various ways of text processing, ranging from digital text editions, digital text archives and corpora to scholarly journals, ontologies, dictionaries, and even non-textual resources like music and graphics, from the representation of his- torical and modern manuscripts and prints to the annota- tion of born-digital texts (TEI projects 2016, TEI SIGs 2016). In addition, a large number of tools have already been provided to further explore TEI resources. The benefit of TEI/XML encoding is of course straight- forward: texts are provided in a free format which is based on the XML standard, well-documented and suitable as an archival format. While being a machine-readable format it allows for the rendering of texts for different contexts (e.g. WYSIWYG versions for reading, critical editions, etc., digital as well as printed versions). However, depending on the preferred annotation depth the application of TEI encoding to texts can become a quite elaborate and costly task. This may lead to the question of further innovative usage scenarios of TEI text encoding, apart from just rendering and archiving texts. In fact, TEI encoding has already provoked other innovative ways of re-use, coming from very different disciplines and areas of interest, such as e.g. the linking of TEI texts with regard to certain features (e.g. Dumont 2016), the transformation of TEI structures to RDF and their further semantic enrichment (e.g. Schrade 2016), the visualization of structures for different purposes (e.g. Pytlik Zillig 2015), and …

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