Corpus Analysis of Historical Documents

Abstract

Historical documents are often used in applied linguistics as a source for studying the structure and use of language in the past. Linguists compile corpora such as the Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER; http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/research/projects/archer/ ) or the Penn‐Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME, 2004; http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist‐corpora/PPCEME_RELEASE‐2/index.html ), using a variety of text types and covering a wide period. They are used for diachronic linguistic studies, to show, for example, lexical or grammatical differences between Early Modern English and present‐day English (e.g., Hundt, 2007), or the structure of a particular language variety (e.g., Dollinger, 2008). In this way the analysis of historical corpora contributes to the understanding of earlier forms of a language and of language variety and change.