Language change is often assessed against a set of predetermined time periods in order to be able to trace its diachronic trajectory. This is problematic, since a predetermined periodization might obscure significant developments and lead to false assumptions about the data. Moreover, these time periods can be based on factors which are either arbitrary or non-linguistic, e.g., dividing the corpus data into equidistant stages or taking into account language-external events. Addressing this problem, in this paper we present a data-driven approach to periodization: 'DiaHClust'. Di-aHClust is based on iterative hierarchical clustering and offers a multi-layered perspective on change from text-level to broader time periods. We demonstrate the usefulness of Di-aHClust via a case study investigating syntactic change in Icelandic, modelling the syntactic system of the language in terms of vectors of syntactic change.

Amsterdam: John Benjamins. When citing, please use the page numbers given there. For the published version, see: https://benjamins.com/catalog/cilt.350.17boo .

This paper provides a brief overview of uncertainty visualization along with some fundamental considerations on uncertainty propagation and modeling. Starting from the visualization pipeline, we discuss how the different stages along this pipeline can be affected by uncertainty and how they can deal with this and propagate uncertainty information to subsequent processing steps. We illustrate recent advances in the field with a number of examples from a wide range of applications: uncertainty visualization of hierarchical data, multivariate time series, stochastic partial differential equations, and data from linguistic annotation.

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This chapter revisits the significant question of embedded Verb Second in historical Germanic, in light of recent developments in research on present-day V2 languages. Drawing on novel corpus data for Old English, Old Saxon, historical Icelandic, and historical Yiddish, it shows that there is little support for an analysis which permits embedded V2 outside a narrow subset of contexts, or one which hosts both the verb and the preverbal constituent within the IP domain (‘IP-V2’). The chapter puts forward the tentative suggestion that there is only one type of V2 language, at least as regards word order in embedded clauses.