This site © 2007 by the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, CB3 9DP
Javier Calle Martín and David Moreno Olalla
University of Málaga
Email: jcalle at uma dot es
The appearance of the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English in 1986 gave a major push to dialectological studies in Middle English. The wealth of information contained therein, together with its revolutionary approach to dialectology and analysis of ME orthography, allowed the user to locate a given text with a degree of accuracy hardly imagined before. Although LALME and its methodology won well-deserved acclaim from all scholarly quarters, there is at least one issue that could not be fully addressed at its period of composition, for the non-existence of a dependable, time-efficient technology within the scholars’ reach: complete allograph recording and arrangement by frequency. For most anchor texts, this had to be done by hand, analysing some sections of the MSS minutely, then scanning the rest of the text. No matter how painstakingly this procedure was followed, the possibility of overlooking a minor spelling variant in the process, and therefore of missing critical information was never too far away, which (at least theoretically) could in turn lead to dialectal misplacement.
Technology has evolved since, and the combination of annotated corpora and database management systems can now help overcome this problem easily, providing us with a fuller image of a treatise’s allographs that not only can be input into a LALME questionnaire for dialectal profiling, but can also ease the path into other trends of research that lie outside the scope of the Atlas. This paper explores the potentiality of an annotated corpus to ascertain the dialectal provenance of the text when used in combination with LALME. GUL MS Hunter 497, an unedited 15 th-century copy of the East-Midlands translation of Macer’s De Viribus Herbarum, will provide the textual source. Transcending LALME, the potentialities of annotated corpora for the automatic retrieval of such information as word richness, collocational and grammatical patterns when used in conjunction with an SQL database management system will also be discussed.