This data set is the appendix for Flick (2020): Die Entwicklung des Definitartikels im Althochdeutschen. Eine kognitiv-linguistische Korpusuntersuchung (Empirically oriented theoretical morphology and syntax 6). Berlin: Language Science Press.

English abstract (the publication is in German): The German definite article originated from the adnominally used demonstrative determiner dër (‘this’). It is known that the categorical shift from demonstrative to definite article took place during the Old High German (OHG) period (750-1050 AD). The genuine demonstrative loses its demonstrative force and appears in contexts in which referents can be identified in dependently of the speech situation (the so called semantic definite contexts). In contrast to former investigations the present study examines this development by means of a broad corpus study. The data consists of the five largest texts of the OHG period which are accessible via the Old German Reference Corpus. The investigation takes a usage-based and constructional approach to language and shows how animacy interacts with the development of the definite article.

The data set contains: (i) annotation guidelines for the following categories (particularly with regard to Old High German data): Animacy, individuation, semantic roles, different types of definiteness, nominal features of the noun phrase. (ii) corpus data which was extracted from a pre-version of the “Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch" (0.1) plus all the annotations that were made during the investigation. (iii) R code that helped transforming, annotating and statistically analyzing the data.

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