Volume 45 (2021): Issue 1 (May 2021)

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.

In spite of the wide agreement among linguists as to the significance of spoken language data, actual speech data have not formed the basis of empirical work on English as much as one would think. The present paper is intended to contribute to changing this situation, on a theoretical and on a practical level. On a theoretical level, we discuss different research traditions within (English) linguistics. Whereas speech data have become increasingly important in various linguistic disciplines, major corpora of English developed within the corpus-linguistic community, carefully sampled to be representative of language usage, are usually restricted to orthographic transcriptions of spoken language. As a result, phonological phenomena have remained conspicuously understudied within traditional corpus linguistics. At the same time, work with current speech corpora often requires a considerable level of specialist knowledge and tailor-made solutions. On a practical level, we present a new feature of BNCweb (Hoffmann et al. 2008), a user-friendly interface to the British National Corpus, which gives users access to audio and phonemic transcriptions of more than five million words of spontaneous speech. With the help of a pilot study on the variability of intrusive r we illustrate the scope of the new possibilities.

This article introduces the new Corpus of Regional Indian Newspaper Englishes (CORINNE). The current version of CORINNE contains news and other text types from regional Indian newspapers published between 2015 and 2020, covering 13 states and regions so far. The corpus complements previous corpora, such as the Indian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) as well as the Indian section of the South Asian Varieties of English (SAVE) corpus, by giving researchers the opportunity to analyse and compare regional (written) Englishes in India.

In the first sections of the paper we discuss the rationale for creating CORINNE as well as the development of the corpus. We stress the potential of CORINNE and go into detail about selection criteria for the inclusion of newspapers as well as corpus compilation and the current word count. In order to show the potential of the corpus, the paper presents a case study of ‘intrusive as’, a syntactic feature that has made its way into formal registers of Indian English. Based on two subcorpora covering newspapers from Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand, we compare frequencies and usage patterns of call (as) and term (as). The case study lends further weight to the hypothesis that the presence or absence of a quotative in the majority language spoken in an Indian state has an impact on the frequency of ‘intrusive as’. Finally, we foreshadow the next steps in the development of CORINNE as well as potential studies that can be carried out using the corpus.