6.3 Lüdeling & Kytö (2009)

Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook is a comprehensive two-volume collection of 61 articles which constitute a very detailed description of the methodology and various case studies. It differs from the other works mentioned in the “Further reading” section insofar as it is the only title to cover historical corpora and their possibilities to reconstruct language change in detail.

The first article that does so, “Corpus linguistics and historical linguistics” by Matti Rissanen (cf. Rissanen 2009: 53-68), elaborates on the fact that a computer-aided variationist approach to the study of the history of English opens up new possibilities for testing existing theories and offering a basis for new theory-building. The chapter “Historical corpora” by Claudia Claridge then introduces various historical corpora, gives exact definitions and shows their use for conducting synchronic and diachronic studies (cf. Claridge 2009: 242-259). Additionally, restrictions and peculiarities of historical corpora are discussed, such as the problem of representativeness, which incidentally is also one of the bigger problems of literature databases, because they only cover the genres fiction and drama (cf. Claridge 2009: 246-249). Claridge informs about the processing of historical texts as well as about annotations of the corpora and she also discusses the possibility of using dictionaries like the OED as corpora. However, she does not mention historical literature databases at all.

In the section dealing with “Existing corpora”, the chapter “Well-known and influential corpora” by Richard Xiao gives a detailed overview of various historical corpora (cf. Xiao 2009a: 383-457). There, the reader can find additional information about the HC, ARCHER, the Lampeter Corpus, the Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form (DOEC) and many more. Additionally, Xiao mentions the Early English Books Online (EEBO)  and the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) databases, which are full-text archives that contain about 100,000 to 150,000 printed volumes each (cf. Xiao 2009a: 404). Unfortunately, Xiao does not go into detail on these databases which are also distributed by ProQuest but only states that the EEBO is “more of an archive than a corpus” (2009a: 404). In another article titled “Theory-driven corpus research: Using corpora to inform aspect theory”, Xiao discusses the possibilities of analysing aspect by means of corpora and comes to the conclusion that corpus data can indeed contribute to linguistic theory (cf. Xiao 2009b: 1004-1005). This is only mentioned here because of its relatedness to the second example study of this companion website.

Finally, the chapter “Historical corpus linguistics and evidence of language change” by Anne Curzan offers a comprehensive survey of the possibilities to examine language change by using historical corpora (cf. Curzan 2009: 1091-1109). In addition, the author gives an impression of what corpus-based evidence has revealed so far about the history of English (cf. Curzan 2009: 1099). Although Curzan does not mention the historical literature databases of our chapter at all and makes only brief remarks on the EEBO, she introduces issues that sound familiar, for example the relatively large size of the EEBO and the fact that it was designed for purposes of literary scholars (cf. 2009: 1096). Furthermore, Curzan argues that such databases are of particular interest for analysing less frequent linguistic phenomena because they can complement more traditional corpus-based studies. She exemplifies this by stating that “historical linguists sometimes need to determine if particular constructions occur at all in a particular time period or are searching for examples of particular phenomena without being concerned […] with frequency”. In these cases, Curzan says, “a large unstructured electronic collection will suffice” (2009: 1096).

Created with the Personal Edition of HelpNDoc: Full-featured multi-format Help generator