ICOME6 Abstract

Gabriel Amores Carredano, Julia Fernández Cuesta and Luisa García García
University of Seville
Email: jgabriel at us dot es, jcuesta at us dot es, luisa at us dot es

Elaboration of an electronic corpus of northern English texts from Old to Early Modern English.

In the course of our research for the project on the history of northern English dialects (BFF2001-1315), we have collected, edited and analysed a number of manuscripts from the 7 th to the 16 th centuries. We are now developing a web interface with the aim of making these texts available to the academic community. The data base should allow information retrieval at all linguistic levels: spelling/phonology, morpho-syntax and lexis. Our initial purpose is to highlight the northern features of the texts; however, the interface will allow users to do searches which are not necessarily focused on dialectal variation (e.g. studies on the evolution of a given of morphological feature, the syntax of different text types, etc.)

Our presentation will show the texts to be included in the e-corpus, the criteria followed in the selection of the features and an example of a late Middle English text as it will appear in the e-corpus.

References:

Fernández Cuesta, Julia / Mª Nieves Rodríguez Ledesma. 2004. Northern Features in 15 th -16 th –Century Legal Documents from Yorkshire”. In Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology. Ed. M. Dossena and R. Lass. Bern: Peter Lang. 287-308.
Fernández Cuesta, Julia / Mª Nieves Rodríguez Ledesma. 2007. “From Old Northumbrian to Northern ME: Bridging the divide”. In Studies in ME Forms and Meanings. Ed.Gabriella Mazzon. (Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 19). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 117-132 .
Fernández Cuesta, Julia / Mª Nieves Rodríguez Ledesma (forthcoming). Northern Middle English: towards telling the full story. In: Geo - historical Variation. Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics.
(ICEHL 14). Eds. Marina Dossena, Richard Drury & Maurizio Gotti. Volume III. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.