About this Book

Surveys some of the research possibilities opened by the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Diachronic and Dialectal which offers computer access to and manipulation of major texts from Old, Middle, and Early Modern English. Supplementary corpora are in preparation for Older Scots and Early American English. They are intended for research into linguistic change, but can also be used to investigate the evolution of literary styles, genres, and other aspects. Introductions to the five periods are followed by examples of studies on the verb to be, similes of equality, the differentiating of each and every, and searching for syntactic constructions.