I am currently leading my own team in the context of an SNSF-funded project on ‘Who did What to Whom: Strategies of Argument Disambiguation in Early English (WWW-SArDEEn)’ (SNSF Starting Grant; 2025-2030).

Henri Kauhanen (Post-doc)

Luka Galjer (PhD)

Jana-Maria Humbel (student assistant)

Elizabeth Wagner (student assistant)

Chris Ritter (student assistant)

One of the most fundamental tasks language users face when interpreting utterances is determining the role of arguments in the clause, such as identifying who (subject) did what to whom (object). To do so, we make use of contextual and semantic information, but also four main morphosyntactic strategies: (i) noun inflection (case marking), (ii) verb inflection (agreement), (iii) fixed word order, and (iv) prepositions. In addition to featuring extensively in research across all linguistic fields, the latter are also the subject of one of the most prominent textbook claims about the history of English, specifically the turn from Old English (OE; 650-1150) to Middle English (ME; 1150-1500). The assumption is that English underwent a trade-off between disambiguation strategies in that (i) case marking and (ii) verb inflection were originally more prominent and decreased, (iii) word order used to be more flexible and became fixed, and (iv) prepositions increased.

However, despite the popularity of this claim, we know surprisingly little about how these changes are in fact connected, and studies on the history of English are strikingly disconnected from current relevant research in cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, typology, and related fields. In addition, research in this area showcases substantial shortcomings of resources and methods in historical linguistics, in particular challenges related to data sparsity and textual features such as extensive spelling variation. These issues have presented great obstacles for data preparation, classification, and analysis, and have also meant that the immense recent progress in the development of AI/ LLMs which are able to handle language-related questions, and especially the use of such models for linguistic tasks has not yet reached historical (early English) linguistics.  

The project seeks to bridge these two gaps. On the one hand, it tackles the gap between historical linguistics and recent cognitive, psycholinguistic, and typological insights on disambiguation strategies by extending relevant concepts to the history of English. On the other hand, it brings together historical linguistics and current methodological advances, by developing highly data-driven, LLM-based methods for OE and ME data, informed by profound linguistic, philological, and sociocultural knowledge of these periods.