Corpus Linguistics in MIddle English and Modern English

What is it about?

The book contains 17 contributions on corpus linguistics in general, on aspects of language change, on English case studies concerning the time from 1100 to the present, and on the particular role that Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (EDD, 1898-1905) may play for a better understanding of English traditional dialects. The four parts all attest to the importance of corpora to a modern study of the English language. In view of the basic difficulty of reconstructing the language status of former periods, the book’s multi-dimensional approach consists in that the individual papers try to shed light on the history of English since Middle English from different viewpoints, from spelling in Middle English to specific word fields, such as CLERGY, to selected word classes, such as adverbs and interjections, and to issues of grammar, such as the subjunctive. The book’s focus is on the EDD, with four papers of Part IV dedicated to it. Given the online-availability since 2009 of this most comprehensive dictionary of English dialects ever (EDD Online), these four papers profit from newly accessible material on dialects. Discussing such issues as the complexity and diversity of dialect lexis, its etymological background, its sources, and the regional attribution to the English North as opposed to the South, this Part IV of the book paves the way for a new understanding of English dialectology, allowing issues of the analysis of sounds, spellings, morphemes, variants, meanings, word compositions, phrases, labels, etymology, sources, and of time attribution.

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Why is it important?

This book underlines the importance of corpus use for the study of historical English, with various approaches demonstrated. Its uniqueness, however, is achieved by the fact that, in one of its four parts, it familiarises the reader with both Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary, published 1898 to 1905, and with the ambitious Innsbruck-based online version of the dictionary, published in its first version in 2009. Given that traditional English dialects have generally been neglected by linguistics, the EDD-specific papers of the book pave the way to a new type of dialectology, allowing comparison of dialectal regions and quantification of usage features.

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