Superabundance and paucity in language On the quantity and quality of evidence in historical syntax

Abstract

This article discusses phenomena that are rare in languages. There is a general discussion of language corpora, especially in historical linguistics, focusing on the quantity and quality of the phenomena used to assess whether their occurrences are consistent with scholars’ knowledge of the grammar of the language in question in a given period. The main emphasis is on historical syntax and changes in sentence structure, with due consideration given to the linguistic methods used to evaluate and analyze sentences. In this context, the question is posed how many examples are needed to be considered significant evidence on the grammar of a particular language or a language stage. It is claimed that this depends on the nature of the individual phenomena. In many cases, a large number of examples are needed to assess the significance of the data, in which case it is important that the data are as abundant as possible. In other cases,
only a few examples – even just one example – are sufficient to show that the phenomenon is grammatically valid and not just an exception or even a mere language error.
Keywords: quality of language corpora, historical linguistics, syntax,
subject tests, oblique subjects