PLAEME: A Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English

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A Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (PLAEME)

PLAEME is a new parsed corpus resource for investigating the patterns of rapid syntactic change in Early Middle English, a period which is underrepresented in other parsed corpus resources.  The corpus comprises 68 texts (c.173,000 words) from the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, annotated with syntactic information in the format of the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English.

PLAEME not only fills a gap in the existing English parsed historical corpora; it also serves as a pilot for a larger project of parsing the entirety of LAEME and of the materials which underpin A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS). LAEME and LAOS have been extensively used to investigate spatiotemporal orthographic and phonological variation. The addition of syntactic information will allow investigation of dimensions of syntactic variation as well. At the same time, using PLAEME in conjunction with the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English and the Parsed Corpus of Middle English Poetry will allow broader comparisons across genres, and facilitate detailed investigation of changes across the entire ME period.

For further description of the PLAEME corpus, please see this paper.

Please send comments and corrections to rob.truswell@ed.ac.uk