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Article published In:
Dialogues in Diachrony: Celebrating Historical Corpora of Speech-related Texts
Edited by Merja Kytö and Terry Walker
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 19:2] 2018
► pp. 286–301

Ere and before in English historical corpora, with special reference to the Corpus of English Dialogues

| University of Helsinki,
In this paper, the use of two roughly synonymous temporal adverbial links, ere and before, will be discussed. The survey will cover the history of English, from Old to Present-day English. It is based on historical corpora, particularly on the Corpus of English Dialogues (1560–1760). Ere (Old English ær) was originally temporal, while before (Old English beforan) goes back to the spatial form. In Old English and Early Middle English ere is clearly more common than before; from Late Middle English on, before becomes the more favoured link. The Corpus of English Dialogues and later corpora indicate that the use of ere is remarkably restricted to informal and speech-related discourse.
Keywords: Corpus of English Dialogues , English historical corpora, temporal adverbial links
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Old English
  • 3.Middle and Early Modern English
  • 4. Corpus of English Dialogues
  • 5.Other Modern English corpora
  • 6.Final remarks
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 1 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00023.ris
References (52)
Corpora
Old English
DOEC (Dictionary of Old English Corpus) ( c. 3.5 million words) = DiPaolo Healey et al. (2009, ongoing).Google Scholar
HC (Helsinki Corpus of English Texts) (OE part: c. 500,000 words) = Kytö (1996).Google Scholar
Middle English
HC (Helsinki Corpus of English Texts) (ME part: c. 500,000 words) = Kytö (1996).Google Scholar
PPCME2 (Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English 2) ( c. 1.1 million words) = Kroch/Taylor. (2000).Google Scholar
Early Modern English
CED (Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760) (1.2 million words) = Kytö/Culpeper. (2006), Kytö/Walker. (2006).Google Scholar
CEEM (Corpus of Early English Medical Writing) ( c. 2 million words) = Taavitsainen/Pahta. (2010).Google Scholar
HC (Helsinki Corpus of English Texts) (EModE part: c. 500,000 words) = Kytö. (1996).Google Scholar
HCOS (Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots) ( c. 800,000 words) = Meurman-Solin. (1995).Google Scholar
PCEEC (Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence) ( c. 2.2 million words) = Taylor et al. (2006).Google Scholar
PPCEME (Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English) (1.8 million words) = Kroch et al. (2004).Google Scholar
Late Modern English
CLMET3.0 (A Corpus of Late Modern English Texts) ( c. 15 million words) = De Smet et al. (2011–).Google Scholar
COHA (The Corpus of Historical American English) ( c. 400 million words) = Davies. (2010–).Google Scholar
PPCMBE (The Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English) ( c. 1 million words) = Kroch et al. (2010).Google Scholar
Present-day English
BNC (British National Corpus) (100 million words)
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LOB (The Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus) (1960s; 1 million words) = Leech/Johansson. (1976, 1986).Google Scholar
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