An introduction to CHET, the Corpus of History English Texts

Abstract

[Abstract] The chapter presents the different methodological issues and the theoretical decisions made when facing the compilation of a corpus of texts dealing with History for the late Modern English period. The first part of the chapter is devoted to how history and historiography appear and the way in which this may affect writing trends from a more general, narrative style to a more objective one as something as a “scientific character” of history writing is claimed by authors. The rest of the chapter is devoted the description of other aspects of the Corpus of History English Texts such as their agreement with decisions already made for the whole Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC) and already applied in the two subcorpora published by Benjamins (CETA, 2012 and CEPhiT, 2016). The questions of representaiviness and balance are also tackled here. The Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC) is a project on which the MUSTE Group (Research Group for Multidimensional Corpus-based Studies in English) has been working since 2003 in the University of A Coruña (Spain). The project is now well-known and has been designed as a tool for the study of language change in English scientific writing in general as well as within the different scientific disciplines (excluding medicine) between 1700 and 1900. All linguistic levels except perhaps phonology can be investigated with it. The CC can be also used for the study of the development of the scientific register at particular moments in history and, in this sense, CEPhiT will serve for the investigation of the language used to individualize Philosophy as we now understand it from the more general discipline it used to be when it equalled “knowledge”. The chapter accounts for the compilators’ interest for discourse analysis and sociolinguistic research, to which end the text samples we have included, when possible, some personal details about the author of each sample and about the work from which the sample has been extracted in a separate file. It also describes some technical aspects such as the process of keying in texts following the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) conventions and XML format as the use of an extended mark-up language makes wide distribution and exploitation possible. A very brief description of the information retrieval tool (Coruña Corpus Tool or CCT) accompanying the corpus is also provided.