We study the productivity of the suffixes ‑ness and ‑ity in seventeenth‑ and eighteenth-century letters in the Corpora of Early English Correspondence. We analyze the role of gender and five internal factors: etymology, the word class of the base, branching structure, semantics, and occurrence… read more
We analyse the social embedding of stylistic change in the frequencies of nouns, lexical verbs and personal pronouns in the Corpora of Early English Correspondence from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Our visualization methods show that the frequency of nouns exhibits a consistent… read more
In this chapter, we discuss some common pitfalls related to historical data and its use in linguistic analysis. We argue that the “philologist’s dilemma”, as originally proposed by Rissanen (1989), should be reconceptualized to meet the needs of the fast-evolving field of corpus linguistics,… read more
This paper tracks stylistic variation in the use of two roughly synonymous suffixes, the Romance -ity and the native -ness, during the Early Modern English period. We seek to verify from a statistical viewpoint the claims of Rodríguez-Puente (2020), who reports on a decrease of -ness in favour… read more
This paper describes ongoing work towards a rich analysis of the social contexts of neologism use in historical corpora, in particular the Corpora of Early English Correspondence, with research questions concerning the innovators, meanings and diffusion of neologisms. To enable this kind of… read more
In this chapter we discuss the current achievements of historical sociolinguistics and highlight new insights provided by the contributions in the volume. Taking the essay by Nevalainen (2015) as a starting point, we will consider the themes of crossing boundaries and bridging gaps between… read more
We investigate the usefulness of part-of-speech (POS) annotation as a tool in the study of sociolinguistic variation and genre evolution. We analyse how POS ratios change over time in the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (c.1410–1681), which social groups lead the changes, and whether… read more
This paper reviews the gap between current methods of text visualization and the needs of corpus-linguistic research, and introduces a tool that takes a step towards bridging that gap. Current text visualization methods tend to treat the problem as a data-encoding issue only, and do not strive for… read more