The EDGeS Diachronic Bible Corpus

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 5232–5239 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 5232 The EDGeS Diachronic Bible Corpus Gerlof Bouma∗, Evie Coussé∗, Trude Dijkstra×, Nicoline van der Sijs+ ∗ University of Gothenburg, × University of Amsterdam, + Dutch Language Institute, Leiden {gerlof.bouma, evie.cousse}@gu.se, g.w.h.dijkstra@uva.nl, nicoline.vandersijs@ivdnt.org Abstract We present the EDGeS Diachronic Bible Corpus: a diachronically and synchronically parallel corpus of Bible translations in Dutch, English, German and Swedish, with texts from the 14th century until today. It is compiled in the context of an intended longitudinal and contrastive study of complex verb constructions in Germanic. The paper discusses the corpus design principles, its selection of 36 Bibles, and the information and metadata encoded for the corpus texts. The EDGeS corpus will be available in two forms: the whole corpus will be accessible for researchers behind a login in the well-known OPUS search infrastructure, and the open subpart of the corpus will be available for download. Keywords: Germanic languages, historical linguistics, parallel corpora 1. Introduction and background We present the EDGeS Diachronic Bible Corpus, a synchron- ically and diachronically parallel corpus of Bible translations in English, Dutch, German and Swedish, spanning six and a half centuries. The EDGeS corpus is constructed in the context of a di- achronic study of complex verb constructions in Dutch, En- glish, German and Swedish. Complex verb constructions are combinations of a main verb with multiple auxiliary verbs. The grammaticalization of auxiliary verbs in the Germanic languages is well-studied (Hilpert, 2011), and can already be observed in the earliest known sources. The rise of the possibility to combine multiple auxiliaries is not nearly as well-charted, but the earliest known attestations of combi- nations of modals in Dutch and English are from the 13th century (Coussé, 2015). In later stages of English, the dou- ble modal construction went into disuse, whereas it thrived and expanded in Dutch. Still, not much is known on why and how complex verb constructions came into being, and how they developed in the history of the Germanic languages. In the context of this research, we have the following wish list for the corpus that will serve as our empirical base ma- terial: First, it should support studies with a longitudinal perspective. Including re-translations at regularly spaced intervals would facilitate such research. Secondly, the con- struction is not highly frequent, so a corpus of sizeable texts is needed. Thirdly and finally, we wish to compare the de- velopment of complex verb constructions between several Germanic languages, so we wish to include parallel trans- lations from a time period in different languages. We thus need a diachronically and synchronically parallel corpus with a sufficient amount of corresponding material. The Bible is the only text that could form the basis of such a corpus: it is large enough (½–1M token range) and has been repeatedly translated into our languages of interest over a long time. To give a small impression …

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