AMC Affiliates Rob Truswell and Rhona Alcorn, both Research Fellows at the University of Edinburgh, have been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to parse a 200,000-word sample from the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) by December 2016. This award marks a first step towards a longer-term goal of fully-parsed versions of LAEME (which contains 650k words from 1150-1325) and its sister corpus LAOS (Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, 280k words from 1380-1500).
The initial phase of the PLAEME (Parsed LAEME) project will focus on previously unparsed texts dating to between 1250 and 1325. This period is poorly represented in extant English corpora yet it is one in which English grammar underwent rapid change. The initial 200k-word parsed sample will create a standalone resource for research into the history of English grammar and will bring LAEME to a whole new—syntactic—audience.
