The corpus Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT) is the second component of the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing (CEEM), a three-part series of historical corpora of medical writing from 1375-1800. EMEMT contains a two-million word representative sample of the entire field of English medical writings that appeared in print between 1500 and 1700, and provides continuity to Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT), published on CD-ROM by John Benjamins in 2005.
The EMEMT corpus includes c. 230 texts, ranging from theoretical treatises rooted in academic...

Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT) is an electronic corpus including 86 texts and 495,322 words from three traditions of medical writing (surgical treatises, specialized texts, and remedy books) from 1375 to 1500, and an appendix of recipes from c. 1330. MEMT provides a new research resource for several kinds of study. Medical writing shows a great deal of variation even at this early phase, and it is possible to trace linguistic and conceptual developments. MEMT is intended for historical linguists, philologists, and historians of medicine. Most text samples come from edited treatises, but...

A new view on the evolution of the language of medicine based on a large electronic corpus of medical texts.

Did earlier speakers of English use the same speech acts that we use today? Did they use them in the same way? How did they signal speech act values and how did they negotiate them in case of uncertainty? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this volume in innovative case studies that cover a wide range of speech acts from Old English to Present-day English. All the studies offer careful discussions of methodological and theoretical issues as well as detailed descriptions of specific speech acts. The first part of the volume is devoted to directives and commissives, i.e....

Diachronic corpus pragmatics extends the pragmatic perspective to developments in the history of various languages and uses corpus-linguistic methods to trace them. The chapters in this volume focus on linguistic elements at several levels, from individual words to phrases, clauses and entire genres and discourse forms. Using the most recent corpus tools, the authors investigate correlations between forms, functions and contexts in diachronic case studies that combine quantitative precision with close qualitative interpretation. The articles deal with different languages including English,...

The history of the English language is a vast and diverse area of research. In this volume, a team of leading historians of English come together to analyse 'real' language, drawing on corpus data to shed new light on long-established issues and debates in the field. Combining synchronic and diachronic analysis, the chapters address the major issues in corpus linguistics methodological, theoretical and applied and place special focus on the use of electronic resources in the research of English and the wider field of digital humanities. Topics covered include polemical articles on the optimal...