Habemus Corpora

Reapproaching Philological Problems in the Age of ‘Big’ Data

Bibliographic Data

ID21533967
AuthorsMark Faulkner (0000-0002-6900-059X, Trinity College Dublin Dublin Ireland, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume139
Issue1
Pages94-127
Publication date2021-03-04
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0340-5222 • E-ISSN: 1865-8938
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/ang-2021-0006
OpenAlexW3152036373
LanguageEN
References cited26

This paper demonstrates the potential of new methodologies for using existing corpora of medieval English to better contextualise linguistic variants, a major task of philology and a key underpinning of our ability to answer major literary-historical questions, such as when, where and to what purpose medieval texts and manuscripts were produced. The primary focus of the article is the assistance these methods can offer in dating the composition of texts, which it illustrates with a case study of the “Old” English Life of St Neot, uniquely preserved in the mid-twelfth-century South-Eastern homiliary, London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D.xiv, fols. 4–169. While the Life has recently been dated around 1100, examining its orthography, lexis, syntax and style alongside that of all other English-language texts surviving from before 1150 using new techniques for searching the Dictionary of Old English Corpus suggests it is very unlikely to be this late. The article closes with some reflections on what book-historical research should prioritise as it further evolves into the digital age

Art · Historical linguistics · Lexis · Linguistics · Literature · Middle English · Old English · Orthography · Philology · Sociology · Syntax · Classics · Computer Science · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics and language evolution · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy

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