Abstract
The compilation of the Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (CSC) was motivated by my awareness that royal, official and family letters were a data source with unique properties in research seeking the reconstruction of both past language use and social as well as cultural practices. Correspondence is a unique source in the sense that it offers both linguists and historians a wide range of informants representing different degrees of linguistic and stylistic literacy and different social ranks and mobility. A number of other factors influenced the decision-making process in the creation of the CSC. Since three geographical areas are well represented in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC; see Raumolin-Brunberg and Nevalainen, this volume), namely East Anglia, London and the North of England,1 the focus on Scotland seemed very relevant. Tracing the diachronic developments and diffusion of numerous linguistic features in the history of English requires directly comparable data originating from the various areas of Scotland.
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Websites
Meurman-Solin, A. 1995 (comp.) Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, 1450–1700.
Helsinki: Department of English, in ICAME Collection of English Language Corpora (CD-Rom), Second Edition (1999), Knut Hofland, Anne Lindebjerg, Jørn Thunestvedt, comps. The HIT Centre, University of Bergen, Norway. http://helmer.aksis.uib.no/icame/hc-oscot/biblio.htm
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© 2007 Anneli Meurman-Solin
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Meurman-Solin, A. (2007). The Manuscript-Based Diachronic Corpus of Scottish Correspondence. In: Beal, J.C., Corrigan, K.P., Moisl, H.L. (eds) Creating and digitizing language corpora. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230223202_6
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