Visualizing Linguistic Change as Dimension Interactions.

Historical change typically is the result of complex interactions between several linguistic factors. Identifying the relevant factors and understanding how they interact across the temporal dimension is the core remit of historical linguistics. With respect to corpus work, this entails a separate annotation, extraction and painstaking pair-wise comparison of the relevant bits of information. This paper presents a significant extension of HistoBankVis, a multilayer visualization system which allows a fast and interactive exploration of complex linguistic data. Linguistic factors can be understood as data dimensions which show complex interrelationships. We model these relationships with the Parallel Sets technique. We demonstrate the powerful potential of this technique by applying the system to understanding the interaction of case, grammatical relations and word order in the history of Icelandic.