Changing usage of L ow S axon auxiliary and modal verbs (2023)

Abstract: We investigate the usage of auxiliary and modal verbs in Low Saxon dialects from both Germany and the Netherlands based on word vectors, and compare developments in the modern language to Middle Low Saxon. Although most of these function words have not been affected by lexical replacement, changes in usage that likely at least partly result from contact with the state languages can still be observed.

## introduction low saxon 2 is an unstandardised west germanic language primarily spoken in the north-eastern netherlands and northern germany. as the contact situation with the state languages dutch and german has led to divergence of low saxon dialects at the border, the primary research question we want to investigate is whether the usage of certain auxiliary and modal verbs can also be found to diverge. this study is part of our broader research into dialectal variation and change in low saxon, cf. @xcite , and constitutes a first exploration of the field of lexical variation. auxiliary and modal verbs are a suitable starting point because they form a relatively closed group for which automatic annotation works more reliably than for many others. we use word vector representations to compare certain auxiliary and modal verbs and investigate changes in usage from middle low saxon to modern dutch low saxon and german low saxon. these vectors representations were trained on lemmata in concatenation with dependency relations and pos (part-of-speech) information. 1 'state languages' refers to standard dutch and standard german here, because they are the only languages with statewide official status in the respective countries. contact with regional official languages, such as the frisian languages or danish, is not taken into account here although this would certainly be an interesting research question as well. ## background the divergence of low saxon dialects at the border has been investigated in the form of lexical replacement as well as changes at the phonological, morphological and syntactic level, e.g., by @xcite and @xcite . a more quantitative study looking at frequencies of local phonological, morphological and syntactic traits in contrast with state language traits is presented by smits ( 2009 ), who examines the stability of dialectal characteristics. all three authors mention the lexical level as an area particularly susceptible to influence from the state languages. instead of lexical replacement mostly referred to by them, we will however focus on changing usage of the same lexical items. ## data the modern low saxon data shown in all subcorpora contain a variety of genres, among others short stories, fairy tales, theatre plays, historical accounts, speeches, and letters. the middle low saxon (mls) data is taken from the reference corpus middle low german / low rhenish (ren-team, 2021), and converted to conll-u format including a conversion of the tags to the ud tagset foot_1 that is used in the lsdc dataset. the genres in the reference corpus are specified as prose, document, or verse. ## methods the word vectors were trained on the whole dataset -both the manually and the automatically annotated part -using fasttext's @xcite skipgram model with a vector length of 100 and subwords foot_5 following these two set-ups: lemma + dependency relation (e.g., dörven_aux), and lemma + pos tags (e.g. wērden_aux). our reason for using subwords during training is that, otherwise, the pos or dependency information, that is part of the same string, could not be accessed. @xcite found dependency information to be beneficial for identifying words that behave in a similar way and not only occur in similar contexts. for comparison, we used pos tags, because the pos tagging in our dataset is more accurate than the dependency relations. we initially also tested vectors based on lemmata only, but eventually excluded these, since they showed great fluctuations even within the same variety, when the vectors were trained with different mininum word counts. furthermore, when working with fasttext's function .get_nearest_neighbors(), we had observed that the suggested nearest neighbours tended to be more meaningful when dependency or pos information was added, as otherwise the importance of uninformative subword units such as nnen or llen seemed to be overestimated. we first trained common vectors with a mininum word count of 50 for both middle and modern low saxon to ensure a common initialisation for all variants. subsequently we fine-tuned this model on middle low saxon and modern low saxon data separately, and finally, with a mininum word count of 25, retrained the general modern low saxon model with data in the subgroups listed in due to the small size of the two subcorpora dls 1 and nls 2 (cf. subsequently, we used the python libraries numpy @xcite and scipy @xcite to measure the euclidean and cosine distances between the resulting word vectors. we will, however, only present the results based on euclidean distance here, since the other approach produced comparable results. despite the common initialisation, the absolute distance values did not compare well across varieties. the reason for this might be found in the different sizes of the subcorpora. therefore, we only discuss the relative closeness compared with the other modal or auxiliary verbs here. ## discussion and future research for wērden, we found partly expected and partly surprising results. the increased closeness of sch ȫlen in german low saxon is in line with the development of wērden into a future tense auxiliary. the slight increase we see in german south low saxon when going from the older to the modern period might tell that this additional usage of wērden was not as widespread yet in the 19 th and early 20 th century. on the other hand, we do not have an explanation for the decreased closeness of willen. however, at least for modern german low saxon, the greater distance might show that the usage of willen as a future auxiliary is in fact not very widespread. mls dls1 dls2 nls1 nls2 sls1 sls2 wēsen wēsen wēsen wēsen wēsen m öten wēsen hebben dörven d ȫren sch ȫlen sch ȫlen künnen m öten künnen d ȫren dörven dörven dörven dörven sch ȫlen willen m ȫgen m öten m öten künnen wēsen m ȫgen m öten m öten m ȫgen künnen d ȫren d ȫren dörven d ȫren hebben künnen d ȫren hebben sch ȫlen hebben dôn künnen dôn hebben m öten dôn künnen sch ȫlen dôn sch ȫlen willen willen m ȫgen d ȫren m ȫgen sch ȫlen willen m ȫgen dôn willen willen dörven willen hebben dôn m ȫgen hebben dôn in dutch low saxon cannot be judged reliably due to data sparsity, we see an interesting decrease in german low saxon. this might be related to the usage of german dürfen, which generally does not carry the meaning 'to dare'. a similar phenomenon can apparently be observed in case of m ȫgen. while the meaning of 'to be allowed to' is still dominant in dutch mogen, it has become less common for german mögen, and the distances we find in moreover, a shift in the usage of negated m öten from 'must not / to not be allowed to' to 'do not need to' as in german might explain the decreased similarity in nls. in conclusion, we find that lexical change and divergence at the border is not only visible in the form of lexical replacement, but also at the level of word usage. for some of the developments described above, such as the increased closeness of wērden and sch ȫlen and the decreased closeness of dörven and m ȫgen in german low saxon, state language influence likely plays a role.