Analysing Constructional Change: Linguistic Annotation and Sources of Uncertainty

This paper presents the various sources of uncertainty we encounter in our project. Our research focus lies on the investigation of language elaboration processes in Middle Low German. We are particularly interested in diachronic constructional changes and constructionalizations involving and affecting all linguistic dimensions. For this, it is necessary to annotate our corpus with Part-of-Speech and constructional tags. Here, we are confronted with gradualness, gradience, and ambiguity as potential sources of uncertainty that complicate the annotation process. Furthermore, due to the historicity of the investigated language, we expect cases of incomplete knowledge and comparative fallacy from the annotators. For this reason, we develop an interface that captures all annotators’ doubts.