Stability and change in Icelandic corpora: The case of Stylistic Fronting

We use Icelandic corpora, the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus, the Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus, and the Newspaper Corpus, in order to investigate the history of a syntactic construction, Stylistic Fronting (SF). SF has long been noted to be associated with formal style and it has received considerable attention in the theoretical syntax literature, but less has been said in the literature about its history throughout the centuries and modern times. We find that use of SF remained stable from the 12th century to the 20th century, but its rate declines in the (late) 20th and 21st century. Our analysis furthermore shows that use of SF is only significantly connected to genre in the most recent data, suggesting that the link between SF and style may be a relatively modern innovation. Finally, we test our data for the Constant Rate Effect, revealing that it is present for some grammatical contexts of SF. Our paper is a digital humanities study of historical linguistics which would not be possible without parsed corpora that together span all centuries involved in the change.