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

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.

Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies

“…A corpus could be something as broad as the British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014) (Love et al, 2017;Brezina, Hawtin and McEnery, 2021), which aims to represent British English as it stood throughout the early 2010s; but it could equally have more modest ambitions and aim to represent a smaller and more specialised varietysomething like the works of Shakespeare (Culpeper et al, 2021) or the language of business meetings (Handford, 2010). These smaller corpora are incredibly useful to the discourse analyst, allowing 'a much closer link between the corpus and the contexts in which the texts in the corpus were produced' (Koester, 2022: 49).…”