English historical corpora

From the editors' introduction:
"The Late Modern English period is taken care of, as it were, by Stefan Dollinger and his article on problems involved in the compilation of a historical corpus. Based on his experience in transcribing early Canadian manuscripts for his Corpus of Early Ontario English, Stefan Dollinger discusses some of the challenges in connection with transcribing Late Modern English handwriting for machine-readable corpora. As a particular test case he focuses on the discrimination of upper and lower case letters, which is shown to depend on a variety of different factors."

Historical corpora offer many potentialities for linguistic research. Thus, the present article provides an overview of the major English historical corpora compiled or being compiled both in Spain and abroad. They include different types such as tagged and parsed corpora, and their main features will be outlined. As for the organisation of the article, after the introductory section, the historical corpora created abroad will be presented. Then, those being constructed in Spain (Coruña, Las Palmas, Málaga, Salamanca, Santiago and Sevilla) will be discussed. Some final remarks and the references close the article.

Speaking of Location 2019: Communicating about Space, part of the Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT) 2019, Regensburg, Germany.
Pitch position. Questions on rule-based and statistical approaches to annotate geographical named entities in historical corpora.

This paper discusses the compilation of the beta version of CECheT, the subcorpus devoted to Chemistry in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing, and reflects on the difficulties faced during this process and how they were overcome. The historical context of science will be examined, particularly that of chemistry, and how this affects the process of compilation.Attention will also be paid to the compilation criteria used in the whole Coruña Corpus, including those regarding the appropriateness of authors and text samples (Moskowich, 2012), and how these criteria have been applied to the compilation of CECheT in order to make it representative of the practices of the discipline at the time.Finally, the corpus will be described briefly, looking at a series of parameters: the topics of the texts, the size of samples, their chronological distribution, as well as the geographical origin and sex of the authors represented.

This paper offers a corpus-driven investigation into the formulaic nature of Early Modern English medical genres. The aim of this study is to answer three related questions: (1) to what extent various text categories in medical discourse share the same lexico-syntactic choices?; (2) what stable and fixed lexico-syntactic patterns repeat across various texts related to medicine?; and (3) is there a diachronic dimension to the employment of these repetitive strings? The study
is based on the recently published electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT, 1500–1700, Taavitsainen et al. 2010) and uses the lexical bundle method (Biber et al. 1999) to extract 3-grams from the normalized version of the corpus. The diachronic distribution of 3-grams across medical texts shows an increase in the number of text categories which share lexical bundles. When
it comes to specific 3-grams, the paper presents a diachronic overview of the most prominent semantic areas where overlaps of fixed strings occur among text categories, e.g. quantification, body parts, time and sequence, or ingredients. The study has also found important overlaps in purely functional contexts, e.g. in clarification, modality or efficacy expressions, and in structural frames, e.g. copula constructions and prepositional phrase fragments. With the help of an objective, frequency-driven corpus tool, the common lexico-syntactic core of early modern medical discourse could be established. At the same time, clusters of text categories sharing the same preferences could emerge.

The present work investigates the English transitive phrasal verb construction (TPV) and the reasons for its variable particle placement. Particles can be placed continuously or discontinuously in relation to the construction verb, e.g. turn off the computer and turn the computer off, respectively. Several studies
point out that noun phrase (NP) length (Hawkings 1994, Gorlach 2004, Lohse et al. 2004; Quirk et al. 1985) and idiomaticity (Gries 2001, Gorlach 2004) motivate particle placement. A study of particles away, off and out in TPVs is developed in favour of an account that considers specific constructions as chunks due to repetition. The hypothesis supported in this work associates loss
of analysability and gain of entrenchment between verb and particle with high token frequency. Thus, a TPV becomes a sequence with verb + particle packaged together and accessed as a unit in consequence of its frequent use (Bybee 2010). Written discourse data collected from BNC (British National Corpus) show a significant preference for the continuous order in spite of
constructions’ variable levels of compositionality and idiomaticity. In relation to particles away, off and out, there is a difference in frequency and range of verbs used with each particle: while away is part of only 8% of the data and
off, 26%, the particle out is present in 66% of all TPVs, which makes out both
the most recurrent particle in the sample and the one with highest type frequency: 96 different verbs were part of out constructions. Results also demonstrate that some verbs are used in both continuous and discontinuous order, whereas others are restricted to one construction only: take joins all three particles and in both orders, while carry is always immediate to out. NPs that follow carry out all bear semantic resemblance, indicating they form equential and indivisible units which seem to be motivated by the NP characteristics.



ATINER's Conference Paper Series LNG2016-2186