<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>This article explores challenges in the corpus linguistic analysis of Shakespeare’s language, and Early Modern English more generally, with particular focus on elaborating possible solutions and the benefits they bring. An account of work that took place within the <italic>Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language</italic> Project (2016–2019) is given, which discusses the development of the project’s data resources, specifically, the <italic>Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus.</italic> Topics covered include the composition of the corpus and its subcomponents; the structure of the XML markup; the design of the extensive character metadata; and the word-level corpus annotation, including spelling regularisation, part-of-speech tagging, lemmatisation and semantic tagging. The challenges that arise from each of these undertakings are not exclusive to a corpus-based treatment of Shakespeare’s plays but it is in the context of Shakespeare’s language that they are so severe as to seem almost insurmountable. The solutions developed for the <italic>Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus</italic> – often combining automated manipulation with manual interventions, and always principled – offer a way through.</p>
</abstract>

This article explores challenges in the corpus linguistic analysis of Shakespeare’s language, and Early Modern English more generally, with particular focus on elaborating possible solutions and the benefits they bring. An account of work that took place within the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language Project (2016–2019) is given, which discusses the development of the project’s data resources, specifically, the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus. Topics covered include the composition of the corpus and its subcomponents; the structure of the XML markup; the design of the extensive character metadata; and the word-level corpus annotation, including spelling regularisation, part-of-speech tagging, lemmatisation and semantic tagging. The challenges that arise from each of these undertakings are not exclusive to a corpus-based treatment of Shakespeare’s plays but it is in the context of Shakespeare’s language that they are so severe as to seem almost insurmountable. The solutions developed for the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus – often combining automated manipulation with manual interventions, and always principled – offer a way through.

Supporting the corpus-based study of Shakespeare’s language: Enhancing a corpus of the First Folio

ICAME Journal

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

This article explores challenges in the corpus linguistic analysis of Shakespeare’s language, and Early Modern English more generally, with particular focus on...

Supporting the corpus-based study of Shakespeare’s language: Enhancing a corpus of the First Folio

Published Online: Jun 12, 2021

Page range: 37 - 86

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2021-0002

© 2021 Jonathan Culpeper et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.