A Corpus of Irish English (extended)

A Corpus of Irish English   (extended, c. 20 MB Zip file)

In the following the structure and design of A Corpus of Irish English is described. The corpus gathers together the main documents for the English language in Ireland throughout its history. These begin in the early 14th century and continue up to the present-day. There are various genres represented in the corpus, reflecting the diversity of text types to be found in the history of Irish English: poetry, glossaries, sketches and full-length plays alogn with stories and novels. The material has been arranged so as to be displayed in an intuitive fashion within Corpus Presenter with which you can examine the files of A Corpus of Irish English. Corpus Presenter lets you browse through the files of the corpus by just clicking on the nodes of the tree you are presented with. You can also, of course, begin working straight away and carry out retrieval tasks concerning matters of interest to you within the context of Irish English.

A Corpus of Irish English was published with Corpus Presenter by John Benjamins, Amsterdam in 2003. The present version, which can be downloaded from the link above has been extended, above all by the addition of nineteenth century material, chiefly novels by Irish authors. The descriptions below assume that you are viewing the corpus with Corpus Presenter.

Getting started

A Corpus of Irish English (extended) consists of over 120 texts with a time span of nearly 600 years. The material is arranged in a manner which reflects the main division in the history of Irish English into an earlier period, from the late 12th century to the end of the 16th century, and a later period, from the beginning of the 17th century to the present. The beginning of the first period is marked by the Norman invasion of 1169 and ends with the defeat of the Irish forces at the battle of Kinsale in 1601. After that date a renewed plantation of the country began with vigorous policies being applied throughout the 17th century which led to new forms of English being introduced, both to the north (from Lowland Scotland) and the south (from Western and North-Western England). There is a degree of continuity between the two periods in the east coast, above all in the city of Dublin. For the remainder of the country the English of the early modern period (17th century) formed the basis for later developments.

First period of Irish English	Second period of Irish English
Middle Ages	Drama (16th to 20th centuries)
Forth and Bargy	Novels (19th and 20th centuries)
Fingal	Varia (17th to 18th centuries)

Sources of the corpus texts

There are basically two sources for the texts of A Corpus of Irish English. The first consists of Irish writers using English as their literary medium. This is the case with the Kildare Poems which represent the earliest attestations of Irish English. Whether these authors were native speakers of Irish, English or to some degree bilingual is uncertain. What is true is that they knew the form of English in Ireland from first hand. The second source consists of writers from outside Ireland, for all practical purposes from England, who chose to represent Irish English in their works, mainly with the aim literary parody, i.e. often within the context of the stage Irishman, a stock figure of fun in English drama.

As the documents stem from both Irish-born and English-born writers they represent a perspective from within and without so to speak. Linguistically this fact is particularly interesting as it tells us what features of earlier Irish English were salient and hence perceived by English authors concerned with imitating Irish speech in their writings. This situation applied from the time of Shakespeare until well into the 19th century and has to a certain extent not ceased to exist if one takes more modern media, apart from drama, into account.

Text types in the corpus

The range of text types in the history of Irish English is impressive. It starts with poetry, the so-called Kildare Poems, a collection of 16 poems in the Harley 931 manuscript housed in the British Museum. There are glossaries for the dialect of Forth and Bargy from the late 18th and early 19th century. These are stored in A Corpus of Irish English as databases and can be transferred to text if you wish. The two remaining text types are 1) drama and 2) the novel. In the latter case a number of novels have been included by such major writers as Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, John Banimm Gerald Griffin and George Moore. The plays contained in the corpus cover a time span of some four centuries, starting with some pieces from the Elizabethan era, through the Restoration period and into the 19th and early 20th centuries. Given the speech basis of drama it plays a central role in the documentation of historical Irish English and is hence so amply represented in A Corpus of Irish English.

Retrieving information

A Corpus of Irish English can be surveyed by clicking on the nodes of the tree which is displayed on the left of the screen. Apart from simply browsing in the corpus you will obviously wish to extract information from the texts it contains. This is done by moving to the retrieval level of Corpus Presenter. You press Ctrl-A or click on the binocular button on the tool bar (or side bar) at the top of the screen and then you choose to specify parameters for a search. What Corpus Presenter will now do is to comb through as many texts as you select and look for the information you specify. For instance, if you wish to search for a syntactic construction, say the habitual aspect in Irish English, then you would enter a search string do — or a list consisting of all the forms of do you would expect — and another string be so that the program would return finds like ...does ...be ... or ...do...be..., etc. Another example would be the immediate perfective of Irish English. Here you would enter after as search string 1 and ing as search string 2 and specify that string 1 is an entire word and string 2 only a part and in addition must occur at the end of a word. This will then lead to returns like She´s after selling the house. They´re after burning the wood., etc.
    The search parameters level contains many useful options. For instance you might wish to specify that only a certain number of intervening items can occur between string 1 and 2, or that a sentence boundary should not be allowed between the two strings. Furthermore, you might wish to have the whole sentence returned as the context for a find. All these and many other options are available here so make sure that you try out all of them to recognise how they might be useful for you in your retrieval tasks.
    All the parameters you may have specified for a certain search can be saved to disk. The suggested extension for a search profile file on disk is .CFG (= ‘configuation’) which you are advised to keep to in order to recognise such a file in future.

Range of searches

As A Corpus of Irish English consists of different files from various periods and representing many genres you may very well not wish to run retrieval tasks on all files. There are two ways of ensuring this. The first is somewhat more complicated but can be useful. This is to create a sub-corpus by checking files in the list mode and then exporting them as a new corpus to a different folder. The second method is easier and more likely to be employed regularly. This is to specify a certain range for the search. Basically, there are five possible types: 1) From first file, 2) Branch only, 3) Just current text, 4) From current position to end, 5) Checked files. The first three options refer to a section of the tree on the left of the screen, i.e. the entire tree, a branch or a single node. But there are cases where the files to be encompassed cannot be referenced by a section of a tree. In such cases what one does is to change the tree display to a list-type display (this can be done via the option Tree or list display in the Display menu, shortcut: F11). Now you can check files of your corpus as you wish. When the selection is made you move to the retrieval level or activate the word list window (depending on the impending task) and proceed.

Making word lists

This option allows users to generate lists of words from the text files of a corpus. At a maximum, you can create a word list of all words in all text files of a corpus. This is unlikely to be the aim of most users, but can be done of course. Instead what linguists are probably interested in is to create a list of selected words in a corpus. For this reason, one of the first options in the large input window which opens on selecting this command is Input word list. Here you specify a plain ASCII file which consists of a list of words, one on each line. Such a word list can be easily created with the supplied program Corpus Presenter Text Editor. The next item to remember, and which is concerned with restricting the words used for a list, is a stop word list. Essentially, this is a list of words (again in the form of a plain ASCII file) which are to be excluded from word list generation. For instance, if you choose to make a word list of an entire text, then it is unlikely that you want to have statistics on the occurrence of such common formatives as a, the, on, at, etc. These and similar words can be excluded by putting them into a stop words list and then specifying it on this level of the program. Word lists can be saved to disk as a text file, a database, a HTML file or an Excel spreadsheet. The latter file format is suitable for further processing of data by different software as most programs for statistical work can take data in Excel files as input.