Annotated Corpus of Pre-Standardized Balkan Slavic Literature

The corpus contains 23 linguistically annotated samples of "damaskini" and other Balkan Slavic manuscripts and print editions from the 15th-19th century, together with over 50 thousand tokens. The texts have similar prose narratives and topics, i.e. hagiographies and apocalyptic themes. The majority of the texts are various editions of the "Life of St. Petka" by Patriarch Euthymius of Tarnovo. The primary goal of the corpus is to provide data for studies of developments in both spoken and written language in the mentioned area and period, especially the features typical for the Balkan sprachbund, e.g. postponed articles, and the analytic infinitive. The corpus has been manually lemmatized and annotated with MULTEXT-East morphosyntactic descriptions developed specifically for this corpus (http://nl.ijs.si/ME/V6/msd/html/msd-bg-dam.html) as well as syntactically analyzed with dependency relations following the Universal Dependencies guidelines (up to Level 2 validation).The annotation reflects a wide spectrum of morphosyntactic features of both archaic (Church Slavonic) and innovative (Bulgarian, Macedonian) varieties. The corpus is available both in source .tsv and derived CoNLL-U formats. The .tsv format includes tokens including accentuation and interpunction, while CoNLL-U uses a diplomatized transcript, more useful for a full-text search. The author would like to thank the following institutions for providing the source texts - National Library "Sv. sv. Kiril i Metodii" in Sofia, Church Historical and Archive Institute in Sofia, Archive of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, Sofia University "Kliment Oxridski", National Library "Ivan Vazov" in Plovdiv, National and University Library of Slovenia in Ljubljana, Russian State Library in Moscow, Library of Matica Srpska in Novi Sad - as well as to Olivier Winistörfer for his invaluable help in preparing the corpus. The update 1.1 includes: - 8 new texts, with over 20k tokens - more data: Cyrillic transcripts, lemma and cross-text references - detailed philological and description of selected texts - sources in plain text forma