Characteristic shifts in the syntax and semantics of Latin: broadening Auerbach's hypothesis-space
Erich Auerbach, a seminal figure of literary criticism, catalogued specific patterns in the evolution Latin's syntax and semantics over the early Christian period. Working in Istanbul during World War 2, his direct access to sources was constrained, and of course he lacked the computational mechanisms that would be particularly helpful for such a temporally wide-ranging study. We are constructing a general Latin corpus, additionally annotated for whether Auerbach had access to each document. By performing unsupervised semantic learning and supervised syntactic parsing over the corpus, we hope to better understand how constraints affected Auerbach's scholarship, how his conclusions generalize, and to expand his hypotheses and consider the broad class of potential syntactic and semantic shifts in Latin from the early Republic through the Middle Ages.