The paper aims at presenting selected notes and remarks on corpora and corpus linguistics. It starts with a brief history of corpus linguistics. It occurs that although corpus linguistics is a relatively young branch of linguistics, it managed to revolutionise all branches of linguistics. Afterwards, the notion of corpus anddifferent types of corpora are discussed . In general, we can say that, on the one hand, there are annotated and unannotated corpora, and, on the other, diachronic and synchronic ones. In the following sections of the article the notions of corpus composition, annotation, size and representativeness are discussed, and towards the end of the paper a list of the advantages of corpus linguistics is presented and some further conclusions drawn.

In our paper we are going to demonstrate that hypotactic constructions develop from paratactic ones and not the other way round. On the basis of numerous Old English examples, we will try to demonstrate how hypotactic constructions come into being and what is the possible mechanism lying behind this process; one can speak of a hypotactic relation between two clauses when one of them is subordinate and the other is main, so in this sense the term subordinate clauses could actually be used interchangeably with the term hypotactic structures. We will concentrate upon the transition phase between parataxis and hypotaxis, which will allow us to see how hypotaxis was developing from parataxis in English.

The paper deals with the problem of defi nite article in the Gothic Bible. More specifically, it concentrates on the differences and similarities of use between the target language, i.e. Gothic, and the source language, i.e. Greek, with special attention being paid to the case of the article – nominative, genitive, dative or accusative. It is part of a larger endeavor aiming at the analysis of the whole Gothic Bible in this respect. This time the Gospel of John is taken into consideration, following an earlier study which concentrated on the Gospel of Matthew. In the paper it will not only be observed how frequently Gothic omits the definite article in places where Greek uses it in the Gospel of John, but also in what way the cases of the definite article vary in both languages due to their grammatical specificities.

The purpose of this article is to present a brief history of the Greek text of the New Testament. The period of time that has been taken into consideration starts around the beginning of the Christian era and ends at around the time when the printing press was invented by Gutenberg. The discussion is devoted to the different kinds of witnesses to the Greek New Testament, such as the papyri, parchment manuscripts, minuscule manuscripts, and fi nally paper manuscripts. It occurs that the existing manuscripts are mere copies of copies, as the archetype manuscripts were lost at an early date. Nevertheless, by studying the earliest manuscripts, as well as a number of later manuscripts, it is possible to get a rough idea of what the original Greek text looked like.

The paper compares the employment of the definite article in the Gothic version of the Gospel of Luke and in its Greek counterpart which served as the basis for the Gothic translation. Although the Gothic text is usually said to be a word-for-word reflection of the Greek text, we demonstrate that just like in the case of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John, which were of concern in our previous studies, there are enormous differences between the two languages especially in the domain of the definite article, not only in terms of amount but also in terms of the cases used – nominative, genitive, dative or accusative.

ln our paper we analysed a corpus of runic inscriptions that belong to the first period. The runic inscriptions that we chose for our analysis are basically full sentences that contain the elements we were interested in, namely, the verb and the object. The main purpose of this analysis was to find some implications as to Proto-Germanic word order. The data obtained during our analysis suggest that the Proto-Germanic word order was VO due to the fact that there is a strong tendency to place nominal objects after the inflected verb in main clauses. However, on the basis of the data concerning the word order in compound NPs, one could rather regard Proto-Germanic as an OV language. However, if one regards the position of the nominal object with respect to the inflected verb as the basic criterion for classifying a given language either as VO or OV, and treats this level as being independent of other linguistic levels, like for example word compounds, one will arrive at the conclusion that it is necessary to classify Proto-Germanic as an VO language.

The purpose of this paper is the investigation of Proto-Germanic word order. To do such investigation, we needed to collect a number of texts written in the oldest Germanic languages, and to produce a tagged corpus on their basis. Due to the fact that there are no written texts in Proto-Germanic proper, we took into account texts from Old High German (OHG), Gothic and West-Saxon, as well as runic inscriptions. In order to objectivise the analysis, we chose texts whose parallel analysis in different languages would be possible. The best candidate for this analysis was the New Testament. Such procedure also allowed us to make recourse to the Vulgate and Septuagint and make further comparisons. The data that we obtained, mostly confirm the opinions generally held about Proto-Germanic word order, but there are some details that seem to say the opposite. For example, that Proto-Germanic had main clauses that were predominantly VO. Therefore, we venture to claim that Proto-Germanic was a VO language, especially if we take into account the elements V(erb) and O(bject).

In our paper we discuss the development of analytical/periphrastic structures in Spa-nish such as the periphrastic passive voice, the periphrastic comparison of the adjec-tictive, and the periphrastic future tense. Moreover, we discuss the process of phonetic attrition within the noun paradigm and the development of the SVO word order from the SOV one. We take into consideration a stretch of time that starts in the pre-Proto-Indoeuropean period and ends in the period of Modern Spanish. One of our conclu-sions is that the development of analytical structures is part of a cyclical process.