Anneli Meurman-Solin

Structured Text Corpora in the Study of Language Variation and Change

From the perspective of a compiler of electronic corpora, one of the major challenges in the attempt to improve their quality is the need to carefully reconsider how language-external variables used to structure them could be defined and conceptualized more precisely to justify references to them as factors conditioning language variation and change. How these variables relate to one another should also be specified. In examining criteria for assessing representativeness of corpora, the concept of range is discussed to stress the evident differences between texts categorized as representatives of a specific genre. Good practices of philological computing are highlighted by illustrating what kind of information can be lost if scholarly rigour is not applied in the process of editing and/or digitizing texts.

Genre as a Variable in Sociohistorical Linguistics

In my previous research, I have referred to ‘genre’ both as a factor conditioning processes of linguistic convergence and divergence in an environment of various coexisting norms, whether local, regional or national.1 It is also a concept that allows us to group texts either primarily by topic (for instance, travelogues, autobiographies, scientifi c treatises, etc.), or by function (for instance handbooks, sermons, pamphlets, law, etc.), or a combination of the two (for instance educational treatises).2 The use of the concept can be extended to genre styles, which can then be described as highly involved or informational and categorized into text types by

The Manuscript-Based Diachronic Corpus of Scottish Correspondence

The compilation of the Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (CSC) was motivated by my awareness that royal, official and family letters were a data source with unique properties in research seeking the reconstruction of both past language use and social as well as cultural practices. Correspondence is a unique source in the sense that it offers both linguists and historians a wide range of informants representing different degrees of linguistic and stylistic literacy and different social ranks and mobility. A number of other factors influenced the decision-making process in the creation of the CSC. Since three geographical areas are well represented in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC; see Raumolin-Brunberg and Nevalainen, this volume), namely East Anglia, London and the North of England,1 the focus on Scotland seemed very relevant. Tracing the diachronic developments and diffusion of numerous linguistic features in the history of English requires directly comparable data originating from the various areas of Scotland.

Circumstantial adverbials in discourse: a synchronic and a diachronic perspective

This study discusses adverbials of circumstance introduced by the grammaticalised connectives seeing and considering in electronic corpora ranging from those on Presentday English (British National Corpus, BNC; International Corpus of English - Great Britain, ICE-GB) to diachronic corpora (Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, HCOS; Corpus of Scottish Correspondence, CSC; Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, CEEM). We claim that it is relevant to distinguish ‘circumstance’ from other semantic roles of contingency. Chiefly because of their thematic potential, circumstantial adverbials can be used in specific functions in genres as different from one another as ‘letter’ and ‘medical treatise’.