9. Variation in the language of London newspapers

This paper discusses the possibilities for research with the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (ZEN) and ways of expanding this corpus. The usefulness of and the problem with text classes is shown. The text class Foreign News was the most prominent one in the early 18th century. The empirical study deals with a special collection of newspapers within the ZEN Corpus, the papers of January 1701. Six newspapers are examined and some aspects of variation (morphological and text-linguistic) are investigated. The need of newspaper corpora of the same month is shown with a comparison of the same topic in different papers. Besides the study of grammatical variation, this will give – ­linguistic – answers to a classification of early English newspapers.