37.3648, Confs: Workshop at ICHL28 Workshop: Historical Treebanks and Linguistic Theory (Iceland)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3648. Thu 05 Nov 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3648, Confs: Workshop at ICHL28 Workshop: Historical Treebanks and Linguistic Theory (Iceland)

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Date: 04-Nov-2026
From: George Walkden [george.walkden at uni-konstanz.de]
Subject: Workshop at ICHL28 Workshop: Historical Treebanks and Linguistic Theory


Workshop at ICHL28 Workshop: Historical Treebanks and Linguistic
Theory
Short Title: ICHL28 W3
Theme: Schemes, Interoperability and Applications

Date: 26-Jul-2027 - 30-Jul-2027
Location: Reykjavík, Iceland
Contact: George Walkden
Contact Email: george.walkden at uni-konstanz.de
Meeting URL: https://ichl28.hi.is/call-for-papers/

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Historical Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 01-Dec-2026

Workshop W3 at ICHL 28 in Iceland:
Historical Treebanks and Linguistic Theory: Schemes, Interoperability
and Applications
(co-convenors: Lisa Gotthard, Dag T. T. Haug, Nikolaos Lavidas,
Christopher Sapp, Carola Trips, George Walkden)
Annotated corpora have become the main empirical basis of historical
linguistics. Over the last twenty-five years, parsed corpora in the
Penn tradition, the dependency treebanks of the PROIEL family and
their descendants, and the historical treebanks released within
Universal Dependencies enable researchers to retrieve instances of an
abstract structure across a language’s recorded history and to test
hypotheses about change on counts rather than solely on collections of
examples (e.g. Taylor 2020: 195–212).
Treebank construction is a methodological intervention, intricately
linked to linguistic theory (Trips & Stokes 2023). Every tag in a
historical treebank records an analytical decision, made under
conditions that differ from those of living languages. On the one
hand, research questions can influence the choice of annotation
schemes, and, on the other hand, the composition of the corpus may
shape what research questions can be asked and what answers can be
obtained (Haug 2015).  Recent developments in treebank construction
are opening up new research possibilities. First, as more treebanks
come online, new avenues are created for comparative work across
related corpora. Second, treebanks are increasingly multi-dimensional,
with some corpora adding information structure or discourse relations,
lemmatization, semantic information, sociolinguistic variables, and
links to external resources such as dictionaries or maps. Increasing
attention is also being paid to forms of metadata that capture the
textual and material dimensions of language use. Finally, advances in
computational linguistics can facilitate the creation of substantially
larger datasets.
However, the growth of resources has also produced a problem of
comparability; the same phenomenon is annotated in different and often
incompatible ways across corpora, so that comparisons across
historical stages or languages may in fact compare annotation schemes
rather than grammars. Conversion between schemes does not remove the
problem, since it loses information: the empty nodes and secondary
dependencies of the PROIEL scheme have no direct counterpart in the
basic Universal Dependencies representation, and constituency and
dependency annotation encode partly different distinctions. Beneath
the linguistic layers lies the philological one. The choice of
edition, the treatment of variants, and the degree of normalization of
spelling and word division all change what is counted.
The workshop brings together builders and users of annotated
historical corpora to address these issues. We invite contributions on
questions including (but not limited to):
 - How have historical treebanks contributed to recent advances in
theories of diachronic syntax?
 - How do theoretical assumptions influence corpus design, annotation
practices, and interaction between annotation layers?
 - How can treebanks support cross-linguistic comparison while
ensuring interoperability across schemes, formats and annotation
categories?
 - How can we ensure diachronic comparability?
 - How should treebanks deal with the philological layer, i.e.
editorial practices etc.?
 - What innovative layers of treebank annotation are resulting in new
discoveries about syntactic variation and change?
 - Can methods from other disciplines such as philology, manuscript
studies, and historical sociolinguistics inform the design of future
treebanks?
 - What are the limitations of parsed corpora – what can they not tell
us, and why not?
 - What forms of metadata are most valuable for enriching historical
corpora and investigating language history?
 - How can computational advances be used to facilitate construction
and annotation of the next generation of corpora? What problems do
these advances pose?
Contributions may concern any language and any period, and case
studies that show what a particular annotation decision does to a
diachronic result are as welcome as papers on the design of schemes
and tools. We invite papers for 30-minute slots, which will be
followed by a closing general discussion of about 45 minutes on
standards for comparability across historical corpora. We intend to
publish selected papers in a thematic journal issue or edited volume.
Abstracts should include a descriptive title, main text and
references. The maximum length for the abstract (excluding references)
is 500 words. Papers not selected for the workshop may still be
considered for the General Session instead.
References:
Haug, Dag. 2015. Treebanks in historical linguistic research. In
Carlotta Viti (ed.), Perspectives on Historical Syntax, 185–202.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Taylor, Ann. 2020. Treebanks in historical syntax. Annual Review of
Linguistics 6. 195–212.
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030515
Trips, Carola, & Peter A. Stokes. 2023. From Original Sources to
Linguistic Analysis: Tools and Datasets for the Investigation of
Multilingualism in Medieval English. In Sara M. Pons-Sanz & Louise
Sylvester (eds.), Medieval English in a Multilingual Context, 4991.
Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03130947-2_3


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