On the Benefits of Enriching the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English to Study Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface: Introducing the Roots & Results (RoRe) Database

This paper introduces and evaluates the Roots & Results (RoRe) database. The RoRe database is a richly annotated dataset of English verbs from three historical stages: Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English. Each verb in the dataset is annotated according to Levin and Rappaport Hovav’s Manner/Result complementarity framework, as well as for etymology and prefixal morphology. The RoRe annotator tool allows users to semi-automatically enrich the lemmatized Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English, which makes it possible to conduct fine-grained analyses of diachronic changes in event and argument structure in the history of English. By means of a case study on the development of verbal prefixation throughout the history of English and the potential influence from language contact with French, the paper illustrates the benefit of enriching syntactically parsed corpora with detailed information regarding the formal properties of individual verbs to arrive at a deeper understanding of developments at the syntax-semantics interface.