“Electronic Resources for Historical Linguists. Part 1:
Medieval Studies”
Christian
Kay
University of Glasgow
Jeremy
Smith
University of Glasgow, UK
Simon
Horobin
University of Glasgow, UK
Margaret
Laing
University of Edinburgh, UK
Keith
Williamson
University of Edinburgh, UK
Chair: Christian Kay
This session and session 8.1 on Monday 24 July will introduce a range of
resources of particular interest to historical linguists and to those
concerned with the development of text corpora and databases. Each of
today's papers will be followed by discussion, but major issues may also be
raised at the group discussion on Monday.
The Middle English Grammar Project
Jeremy Smith Simon Horobin
The study of linguistic variation in Middle English has undergone a
revolution in recent years, with the publication of the "Linguistic
Atlas of Late Mediaeval English" (McIntosh, Samuels and Benskin
1986) and other important surveys. However, no thorough-going
attempt has as yet been made to harness this new information to a
wider programme of linguistic description which is oriented from
both structural and variationist perspectives. The Middle English
Grammar Project, a British-Academy funded venture now underway at
the University of Glasgow and at Stavanger College, Norway, is
designed to address this gap, with the production of surveys
covering the whole field of ME linguistic studies: spelling,
phonology, grammar and lexicology. The Project is currently focused
in the UK within the Institute for the Historical Study of Language,
a research-centre within Glasgow's Faculty of Arts. The first
research area being addressed by the Project is the creation of a
new history of ME spelling and phonology. In order to carry out this
analysis a corpus of machine-readable texts is currently being
assembled. These texts are subsequently classified according to both
Present-Day and etymological reflexes and the results of this
process are entered in a database. This database includes a variety
of extralinguistic information in addition to the classified
spelling data, such as genre and script, which allows the corpus to
be interrogated according to a number of different factors. This
presentation will demonstrate this database and discuss its uses for
the study of linguistic variation in Middle English, and historical
linguistics more generally.
Two Historical Linguistic Atlases
Margaret Laing Keith Williamson
The principal aim of the "Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English"
(LAEME ) and the "Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots" (LAOS) is to
produce historical linguistic atlases complementary to "A Linguistic
Atlas of Late Mediaeval English" (LALME)°. Computer-based data-processing and
analysis have been employed in the projects from their inception in
1987 . Their methodology differs radically from that used in LALME.
Instead of recording data by a questionnaire of prescribed items,
entire texts are diplomatically transcribed and keyed onto disk,
where they can be analysed linguistically using programs written
in-house. Each word or morpheme in a text is tagged according to its
lexical meaning and grammatical function, and each newly tagged text
is added to the corpus. The tagging creates a taxonomy of the
linguistic material in the texts and permits systematic comparison
of their dialects. Information on particular items (defined by one
or more tags) may be abstracted from the corpus to identify spatial
and/or temporal distributions of the forms associated with the item.
The programs generate dictionaries, concordances, chronological
charts and input files to mapping software. Maps are produced to
show distribution of features or full text forms. This method of
analysis has considerable advantages over the questionnaire. Items
for study can be selected from a complete inventory of linguistic
forms rather than from some predetermined sample. Tagged texts are
immediately and constantly available to be processed and compared in
whatever ways are desired. While not all the material in the corpus
will be useful for dialectal analysis, it remains available for a
wide range of future studies: historical phonology, morphology,
syntax or semantics. We will demonstrate our method of
lexico-grammatical tagging and illustrate how it may be exploited
not only for linguistic geography, but also for phonological and for
syntactic investigations.