Building and Using a Richly Annotated Interlinear Diachronic Corpus: The Case of Old High German Tatian

The present paper reports on the development and evaluation of a historical corpus designed to support detailed empirical studies on the interaction of information structure and syntax in Old High German (OHG). The creation and exploration of this corpus are part of a more general investigation concerning the role of information-structural factors in the explanation of word order variation and change in the Germanic languages. The paper also describes corpus design principles, methodologies, relevant formats and specifications, and the technical infrastructure employed during the creation of the corpus, as well as its accessibility by means of the linguistic database of information structure ANNIS.