Forthcoming: A corpus linguistic study in Syriac: Definiteness and change in the noun phrase

This study is the first thorough investigation of definite article loss in the Late Aramaic dialect, Classical Syriac, using corpus linguistic methods. A diachronic corpus is built comprising approximately 400,000 words and structured across ten authors spanning thirteen centuries. A number of key findings emerge from corpus searches on the distribution of Emphatic-Absolute noun forms in Cardinal (1-10), Nominal Negation and Quantifier phrases. This study demonstrates the value of corpus linguistics for studies in historical syntax in Aramaic, and Semitic broadly, while also contributing fresh evidence in support of mechanisms of syntactic change in human languages of an under-represented historical variety.