The present dataset was used in a corpus study on the diachrony of subject placement in the history of Latin, to appear in 'Catalan Journal of Linguistics'. The main file contains a set of Latin examples, which have all been annotated for a number of variables needed for the purpose of the study. A detailed description of the contents of this dataset is given in the README file. Finally there is a file with the R-code used to produce all the quantitative data mentioned in the paper.

Below you can find the abstract of the article.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide further support for one aspect of the analysis of Classical and Late Latin clause structure proposed in Danckaert (2017a), namely the diachrony of subject placement. According to the relevant proposal, one needs to distinguish an earlier grammar (‘Grammar A’, whose heyday is the period from ca. 200 BC until 200 AD), in which there is no A-movement for subjects, and a later grammar (‘Grammar B’, which is on the rise from ca. 50-100 AD, and fully productive from ca. 200 AD onwards), where subjects optionally move to the inflectional layer. Assuming the variationist acquisition model of language change developed in Yang (2000, 2002a,b), I present corpus evidence which confirms that it is only in the Late Latin period that TP-internal subjects fully establish themselves as a grammatical option.

See previous.