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Corpus studies of language through time: Special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 27:4 (2022)
Edited by Tony McEnery, Gavin Brookes and Isobelle Clarke
[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 27:4] 2022
► pp. 529–553

Strategies in tracing linguistic variation in a corpus of Old Irish texts (CorPH)

ORCID logo | Maynooth University
ORCID logo | University College Dublin
ORCID logo | Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas
ORCID logo | Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
ORCID logo | Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
ORCID logo | Maynooth University

This article introduces Corpus PalaeoHibernicum (CorPH), a corpus currently consisting of 78 texts in Early Irish (c. 7th–10th cent.) created by the ERC-funded Chronologicon Hibernicum (ChronHib) project by bringing together pre-existing lexical and syntactic databases and adding further crucial texts from the period. In addition to being annotated for POS, morphological and syntactic information, another layer of annotation has been developed for CorPH – ‘Variation Tagging’, i.e. a tagset that numerically encodes synchronic language variation during the Early Irish period, thus allowing for much improved research on the chronological variation among the material. Another new pillar of studying linguistic variation is Bayesian Language Variation Analysis (BLaVA), in order to address the challenge that “not-so-big data” poses to statistical corpus methods. Instead of reflecting feature frequencies, BLaVA models language variation as probabilities of variation.

Keywords: Old Irish, diachronic variation, Chronologicon Hibernicum, Bayesian statistics, variation tagging
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Characteristics of Old Irish
  • 3.The corpus
  • 4. Corphusator
  • 5.Variation tagging
  • 6.Bayesian language variation analysis
  • 7.Advantages and benefits of the methods
  • 8.Challenges and desiderata
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 20 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22018.sti
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