2 Glossary

Although many technical terms are explained in the chapter itself, this very brief glossary is designed to provide short descriptions of those terms whose meanings are not sufficiently clear from their context.

Historical corpus. A fixed set of surviving texts (or samples of them) of an extinct or living language from a particular period in history, nowadays provided in electronic form (cf. McEnery & Hardie 2012: 94). A corpus that covers samples from multiple time periods is called diachronic.

Diachronic. A study design that seeks to investigate changes within a language over time (cf. McEnery & Hardie 2012: 242). The historical corpora discussed in the chapter all contain texts from broader time spans and are therefore diachronic.

Part-of-speech (POS) tagging. Additional information added to a word of a corpus in order to signal its grammatical category (cf. McEnery & Hardie 2012: 248). As is also the case with syntactic parsing, special search software (e.g. WordSmith, CorpusSearch) is needed to be able to use these annotations.

Syntactic parsing. Annotations to a corpus which provide information about the syntactic structure of a text or a specific sentence of the text (cf. McEnery & Hardie 2012: 248).

Concordancer. A program that is able to list every instance of a specific search word in a text alongside a certain amount of preceding and following context (cf. McEnery & Hardie 2012: 241). The concordancing program used in the chapter, WordSmith, also offers other functions which facilitate sorting, displaying, categorising etc.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language). The contemporary standard language for a range of data-transmission purposes on the Internet and for use in corpora (cf. McEnery & Hardie 2012: 253).

Key word in context (KWIC). The standard format for listing the results of a keyword search in a concordancing program which displays not only the word but also its context (cf. McEnery & Hardie 2012: 245). See Concordancer.

WordSmith Tools. Suite of programs for analysing how words behave in texts (cf. http://www.lexically.net/downloads/version6/HTML/index.html). One of these programs, “Concord”, is a concordancer. The program “WordList” shows a list of all words and “KeyWords” allows for finding the key words in a text.

Statistical significance. The result of a significance test that allows a statement about whether a quantitative finding is genuine or merely a product of chance (cf. McEnery & Wilson 2001: 77-80).

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