Early Modern English Trials: Introducing the Corpus
Emma Pasquali
University of Naples L’Orientale
This paper illustrates the peculiarities of the Corpus of Early Modern English Trials (1650-1700),
henceforth EMET, a highly specialized historical corpus of trial proceedings. The main purpose of
the creation of the above-mentioned corpus is to shed light on the pragmatic aspects of Early Modern
spoken English, since trial proceedings are considered records of authentic dialogues (Culpeper and
Kytö 2010:17).
The initial part of the essay will illustrate the phase of the archives consultation, the criteria
behind the selection of the trials and it will also discuss the technical stages that are necessary to the
uploading of a corpus on #LancsBox and its study. Afterwards, the EMET itself will be presented by
specifying the number of documents, the total number of tokens, the types of charges involved and
the average number of tokens per text. Besides, the paper will also present a prototype of trial
information sheet that will provide a guide for users.
The final part of the study will display a comparison between the EMET and A Corpus of
English Dialogues 1560-1760 (CED), in order to underline the kinship and the differences they
present.
References
Primary Sources
CED = A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760 (2005). Compiled by Merja Kytö (Uppsala
University, Sweden) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University, England).
Secondary Sources
Brezina, V. / Timperley, M. / McEnery, T. (2018). #LancsBox v. 4.x [software]. Available at:
http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox.
Culpeper, J. / Kytö, M. (1997). "Towards a corpus of dialogues, 1550-1750." In Language in Time
and Space: Studies in Honour of Wolfgang Viereck on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday,
edited by H. Ramisch and K. Wynne (eds), 60-73. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
Culpeper, J. / Kytö, M. (2010). Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garside, R. / Leech, G. / McEnery, T. (eds). (1997). Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from
Computer Text Corpora. London: Taylor & Francis.
Kytö, M. / Walker, T. (2003). "The Linguistic Study of Early Modern English Speech- Related Texts
How 'Bad' can 'Bad' Data Be?" Journal of English Linguistics, 31:221-248.