Early Modern English

In the Early Modern English period (1500–1700), steps were taken toward Standard English, and this was also the time when Shakespeare wrote, but these perspectives are only part of the bigger picture. This chapter looks at Early Modern English as a variable and changing language not unlike English today. Standardization is found particularly in spelling, and new vocabulary was created as a result of the spread of English into various professional and occupational specializations. New research using digital corpora, dictionaries, and databases reveals the gradual nature of these processes. Ongoing developments were no less gradual in pronunciation, with processes such as the Great Vowel Shift, or in grammar, where many changes resulted in new means of expression and greater transparency. Word order was also subject to gradual change, becoming more fixed over time.Peer reviewe

Corpus linguistics as digital scholarship : Big data, rich data and uncharted data

This introductory chapter begins by considering how the fields of corpus linguistics, digital linguistics and digital humanities overlap, intertwine and feed off each other when it comes to making use of the increasing variety of resources available for linguistic research today. We then move on to discuss the benefits and challenges of three partly overlapping approaches to the use of digital data sources: (1) increasing data size to create “big data”, (2) supplying multi-faceted co(n)textual information and analyses to produce “rich data”, and (3) adapting existing data sets to new uses by drawing on hitherto “uncharted data”. All of them also call for new digital tools and methodologies that, in Tim Hitchcock’s words, “allow us to think small; at the same time as we are generating tools to imagine big.” We conclude the chapter by briefly describing how the contributions in this volume make use of their various data sources to answer new research questions about language use and to revisit old questions in new ways.Peer reviewe

A tribute to Matti Rissanen

Non peer reviewe

Charting orthographical reliability in a corpus of English historical letters

Peer reviewe