Institut für Anglistik

The Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Proseis a compilation of 129 works (in 159 files) of Middle English prose, digitized from extant editions. Its size amounts to some 7.8 mill words. The corpus can, of course, well be used for (comparative) linguistic analyses, the more so as prose, on an average, employed a language less stylised than verse and was, thus, relatively close to the language really used by people. But since the corpus is a full-text database, it additionally aims at target groups of users who, unlike those of the Helsinki Corpus, are not so much interested in extracts of texts, but in their complete versions. The corpus thus allows literary, historical and topical analyses of various kinds, moreover studies of cultural history. As to language analysis, it invites linguists to raise questions of style, rhetorics and narrative technique, for which one would want a lengthier piece of text or even the complete text

Until recently, only a selection of the corpus, viz. 108 works (in 139 files, with about 6.8 mill words), was available on CD-ROM outside the English Department of the University of Innsbruck, due to copyright restrictions imposed by EETS. But as of 1 October 2010, we are happy to say that the Early English Text Society has graciously granted the fair academic use of all their texts that are part of the Innsbruck Prose Corpus (order form). We are most obliged to both OUP, the owner of copyright of EETS publications, and various other publishers that have likewise permitted their Middle English works to be included in the corpus and to be, thus, accessible to the international community of researchers.

The Letter Corpus of ICAMET contains 469 complete letters (total size: 182.000 words), arranged diachronically, from different sources. The letters were written between 1386 and 1698. The corpus particularly encourages, apart from language analyses, pragmatic and sociolinguistic studies, but also analyses concerning cultural life and lifestyle. The corpus comes in three versions: original, normalized, and interlinearly combined (order form).

The normalised bi-linear version can be used best after starting a macro program (Linguistik.dot), which allows visualising and analysing the two lines separately. The macro is added on the CD-ROM. First open "Linguistik.dot" and then "Innsbruck Letters 2 lines". The two files should be items of the same menu.

The ICAMET Varia Corpus is a mixture of tagged, normalized, translated and otherwise manipulated or synopsized texts, with the interventions motivated by the wish of making Middle English of Modern English texts fully accessible and more easily comparable with each other. The Varia Corpus is a field of constant experimenting, so that regular updatings must be reckoned with.

HEDGEHOGS (i.e. German and French Schoolbooks of English)

• Director: Manfred Markus
• Scanning: Andrea Leonie Krapf

HEDGEHOGS stands for Historical English Dictionaries, Grammars and Educational Handbooks of German Schools

Mainly for practical reasons, the corpus material has been limited to books published between 1650 and 1850. The first forty-nine copies are to be seen in gif-format on our library's homepage (see http://www.literature.at/webinterface/library/COLLECTION_V01?objid=10886). Tiff-formats of the same texts, ready to be used for OCR (Optical character recognition), can be sent to scholars for fair academic use on condition that we (English Department, University of Innsbruck, Austria) later get a free copy of the machine-readable text(s) produced on the basis of our tiff-format images. For a sample of the quality of our tiff-files click on here. For ordering a tiff-version of files, please click on Manfred.Markus@uibk.ac.at.

Acknowledgements: We are obliged to the following libraries for allowing us to scan books:

University Library Augsburg:

Christian M. Ludwig, M. Christian Ludwigs Gründliche Anleitung zur Englischen Sprache. Leipzig: Thomas

Fritschen, 1717.

V. J. Peyton, The Elements of the English Language. London: Nourse & Vaillant, 1780.

Richard Parker Proctor, Englische Sprachlehre. Mietau: Jabok Friedrich Hinz, 1778.

William Thompson, Kompendium der Englischen Sprache. Frankfurt, 1775.

William Thompson, Sundries. Francfort: John Gottlieb Garbe, 1776.

Isaac Watts, Englische Grammatik oder Die Kunst Englisch zu lesen und zu schreiben. Bremen: G. W.

Rump, 1752.

University Library Munich:

Johann Ebers, Theoretische und praktische Grammatik der englischen Sprache. 4. Aufl. Halle, 1812.

Johann Gottfried Flügel, Vollständige englische Sprachlehre für den ersten Unterricht. Leipzig, 1829.

Johann Gottfried Flügel, Vollständige englische Sprachlehre für den ersten Unterricht sowohl als für das

tiefere Studium: nach d. besten Grammatikern u. Orthöpisten: Beattie, Harris, Johnson, etc. Leipzig,

1824.

Karl Philipp Moritz, Englische Sprachlehre für die Teutschen. 2. Aufl. Berlin, 1786.

Rudolf Sammer, Rud. Sammers Englische Sprachlehre: den Teutschen zur Erlernung dieser Sprache /

Herausgegeben mit kritischen Anmerkungen. Wien, 1783.

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München:

John J. Bachmair, Neue Englische Grammatik. 2. Aufl. London, 1758.

Abel Boyer, A New French Grammar. Rotterdam, 1739.

Pierre L. Siret, Nouvelle Grammaire Anglaise Pratique. Londres: Boosey, 1795.

University Library Regensburg:

Karl Gaulis Clairmont, Syntaxis der englischen Sprache in dreißig Lectionen eingetheilt. Wien: Braumüller

und Seidel.

Karl Gaulis Clairmont, Vollständige Englische Sprachlehre, die Syntaxis in dreißig Lectionen eingetheilt.

2. Aufl. Wien: Braumüller und Seidel, 1844.

Johann Georg Müchler, ed. Englisches Lesebuch für die ersten Anfänger. Berlin: August Mylius, 1782.

SPE (Special Englishes)

• Director: Manfred Markus
• Compiler: Lisa Trawöger
• Technical advice: Michael Oberhauser

This database of now just over a hundred recorded varieties of English worldwide (with transcriptions, informative background data and maps) is meant to focus on countries/regions of relatively small size/importance, but with a sometimes fascinating history and/or an extraordinary cultural complexity. Examples in Europe are: Malta, Gibraltar and the Channel Islands.

The convenient availability of material, including sonograms, wants to encourage academic concern with "the lesser used languages", both in teaching and research.

ESP (English for Specific Purposes)