This paper presents an example of a historical study based on comparable corpora. It aims to analyse and compare the distribution of different parts of speech in Old English and Old High German, thus providing a quantitative basis for further conclusions concerning different patterns of the development of those two West-Germanic languages. A particular attention has been devoted to the frequencies of prepositions and pronouns, as there are considerable differences between the languages in this respect. In addition, the article is a an attempt to show the importance and relevance of computational data for contrastive historical linguistics and their role in supporting or disproving traditional theories.
This article deals with the system of distribution of prepositions na, v and do in oikonyms, which is an issue that has not been systematically described in any scientific work yet. At the beginning hypotheses, which I have determined on the basis of literature, are stated; then follows a description of a fieldwork, by which I was trying to verify those hypotheses. The result of this work consists then in a comparison of the obtained data with hypotheses and in a description of the determined system of distribution of investigated prepositions in oikonyms.
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