- Ph.D., Germanic Linguistics and Philology, Indiana University, 2006
Christopher D. Sapp
Professor, Germanic Linguistics and Philology
Director of Graduate Studies, Germanic Studies
Adjunct Professor, Department of Linguistics
- csapp@iu.edu
- Office Hours
Education
Fields of interest
- Morphology and syntax of German
- Parsed historical corpora of Germanic
- Medieval Germanic languages and philology
- Language variation and change
About Christopher Sapp
I earned my M.A. and Ph.D. in Germanic Studies at I.U., finishing in 2006. For fourteen years, I was a professor of German and Linguistics at the University of Mississippi. I joined the faculty at I.U. in 2020, where I teach courses on German syntax and the medieval Germanic languages.
My research investigates grammatical change in the medieval and modern Germanic languages, and for this work I employ historical corpora, informed by linguistic theory and statistical methods. My Ph.D. dissertation, published in 2011 as The Verbal Complex in Subordinate Clauses from Medieval to Modern German investigated word order in verb clusters in the history of German. German is famous for clustering verbs at the end of the clause (as parodied by Mark Twain), but the properties of German verb clusters have changed over time and are subject to many grammatical and sociolinguistic constraints. My work investigated word-order variation in these clusters from Old High German to the modern dialects and Standard German, concluding that the changes in question are best treated as resettings of micro-parameters.
Another major project involved collaboration with Dorian Roehrs. We investigated changes to constructions involving indefinite pronouns that occur with an adjective, which have changed over time from genitive to showing agreement (etwas Gutes, niemand anderer, etc.) We traced these constructions through the entire history of German, and also investigated equivalent structures in the other Germanic languages. One of our key findings is that the loss of the genitive case on the adjective is the result of syntactic reanalysis of the indefinite pronouns themselves, which have become more and more like adjectives over time.
My most recent book began with a study of changes to relative clauses in the history of Old Norse. I established that what appears to be a demonstrative pronoun (sá) is actually a relative pronoun, which emerges in the Viking Age but quickly declines during the flourishing of Old Norse literature. This discovery led to a full-fledged attempt to date the anonymous, mythological poems of the Poetic Edda based on changing grammatical features such as the emergence of relative sá. This work establishes that most of the poems in question indeed date to the pagan Viking Age and are not the fanciful creations of later (Christian) scholars.
My current work is a collaborative project with Rex Sprouse (IU Dept. of Second Language Studies), Elliott Evans, and graduate assistants to create the Indiana Parsed Corpus of Historical High German, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. This will be a syntactically annotated corpus of 165 texts from 1150 to 1950. On our web site you can learn more about the project and even query the texts that are already fully annotated.
Selected publications
Books
- 2022. Dating the Old Norse Poetic Edda: A multifactorial analysis of linguistic features. Studies in Germanic Linguistics 5. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- 2019. Einführung in die deutsche Linguistik / Introduction to German Linguistics. Open educational resource. University of Mississippi:eGrove. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=open
- 2016. With Dorian Roehrs. Quantifying Expressions in the History of German: Syntactic reanalysis and morphological change. Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 230. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- 2011. The Verbal Complex in Subordinate Clauses from Medieval to Modern German. Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 173. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Articles
- 2024. "Introducing the Indiana Parsed Corpus of (Historical) High German." With Daniel Dakota, Elliott Evans, and Rex Sprouse. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), 9224-9233, Torino, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics. [https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.807/]
- 2023. "Dating and authenticity of skaldic verse in some sagas of Icelanders." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 122: 320-349.
- 2023. "Parsing Early New High German: Benefits and limitations of cross-dialectal training." With Daniel Dakota and Elliott Evans. In Proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023), 54-66, Washington, D.C. Association for Computational Linguistics. [https://aclanthology.org/2023.tlt-1.6/]
- 2021. "Dialectal variation in Old Saxon and the origins of the Hêliand manuscripts." With Juliana Norton. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 120: 516-540.
- 2019. "Arrested development: Case attraction as a transitional stage from Old Icelandic demonstrative to relative sá." Language (Historical Syntax) 95(1): e1-e40.
- 2019. "Relative clause types and the dating of Eddic and Skaldic poetry." Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 102: 18-44. (non-peer-reviewed) https://projekt.ht.lu.se/grimm/scandiasyn/working-papers-in-scandinavian-syntax
- 2018. "Complex quantifiers with genitive and concord in Old English and beyond." With Dorian Roehrs. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 21.3: 381-419.
- 2016. "Word order patterns in the OHG right periphery and their Indo-European origins." Diachronica 33.3: 367-411.
- 2016. "Head-to-modifier reanalysis: The rise of the adjectival quantifier viel and the loss of genitive case assignment." With Dorian Roehrs. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 28.2: 89-166.
- 2014. "Extraposition in Middle and Early New High German." Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 17.2: 129-156.
- 2012. "Microparameters in the verbal complex: Middle High German and some modern varieties." Parameter Theory and Linguistic Change, ed. by Charlotte Galves, Sonia Cyrino, Ruth Lopes, Filomena Sandalo, and Juanito Avelar, 43-59. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
- 2011. "Auxiliary selection in the Early New High German perfect tenses." Groninger Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 53.2: 29-43. [https://ugp.rug.nl/GAGL/article/view/30526]
- 2010. "The Reflexive Possessive sîn in Old Saxon." Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur 132.3: 329-342.
- 2009. "Syncope as the Cause of Präteritumschwund: New data from an Early New High German corpus." Journal of Germanic Linguistics 21.4: 419-450.
- 2007. "Focus and verb order in Early New High German: Historical and contemporary evidence." In Roots: Linguistics in search of its evidential base, ed. by Sam Featherston and Wolfgang Sternefeld, 299-318. Berlin: de Gruyter.
- 2006. "The Rise of the Suffixal Article in the Early North Germanic DP." With Dorian Roehrs. In Proceedings of the Western Conference on Linguistics 2004, ed. by Michal Temkin Martinez, Asier Alcazar, and Roberto Mayoral Hernandez, 290-301. Fresno: California State University. [http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000301]
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