A Parsed Historical Corpus of Modern English

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，安东尼·克罗赫博士和比阿特丽斯·圣托里尼博士将创建一个100万字的现代英语文本和文本样本的语法注释电子语料库，涵盖从公元1700年到1900年。这个语料库是宾夕法尼亚大学和英国约克大学的研究人员在过去十年中创建的系列语料库中的第四个。现有的三个语料库涵盖了900年的英语历史（约公元800年至公元1700年），包括超过450万单词的运行文本，对词性进行了标记，并对句法结构进行了注释。语料库支持将语法分析与随时间变化的统计跟踪相结合的研究，其细节和精确度是前所未有的。因此，它们被用来研究几个世纪以来英语语言所经历的许多变化。然而，将现代英语与早期语言区分开来的语言变化只在18世纪和19世纪完成，因此需要新的语料库来暂时完成对现代英语兴起的研究。新的语料库将在几个方面加强电子语料库对语言科学日益增长的影响。首先，语言变化的研究正在发生革命性的变化，因为语料库以易于管理的形式提供了大规模和精确调查所需的数据。由于语料库是公开可用的公共数据资源，因此可以以以前不可能的置信度和精确度比较不同的分析。第二，语料库允许历史工作与语言学的其他领域更有效地互动。因此，基于语料库的语言变化时间过程研究刺激了最近关于语言变化和语言习得之间长期假设的联系的讨论。此外，应用数学家已经开始使用解析的历史语料库提供的详细数据来测试语言变化如何在人群中扩散的动态系统模型。第三，在计算语言学中，语料库开始被证明可以作为自动处理器的测试平台，尤其是语法分析器。至关重要的是，它们包含了广泛的体裁和语法复杂程度，这与目前的标准测试平台佩恩树库不同。由于现代英语的语法与现代英语的语法差别很小，因此所提出的新现代英语语料库在这方面将特别有用。最后，语料库解析开始对语言学本科教育产生影响。它们被用于本科研究课程，学习使用它们可以加强学生对语言结构的理解，同时，语料库为研究项目提供了数据集。因为它的语言对理解不构成语言障碍，所以目前的语料库对这一目的特别有用。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Anthony Kroch and Dr. Beatrice Santorini will create a one million word syntactically-annotated electronic corpus of Modern English texts and text samples, covering the years from 1700 to 1900 C. E. This corpus is the fourth in a series created over the past decade by researchers at Penn and at the University of York, England. The three existing corpora cover 900 years of the history of English (ca. 800 C. E. to 1700 C. E.) and comprise more than 4.5 million words of running text, tagged for part of speech and annotated for syntactic structure. The corpora support studies that combine grammatical analysis with the statistical tracking of changes across time, at a level of detail and precision never before possible. As a result, they have been used in the study of many changes that the English language has undergone over the centuries. However, the linguistic changes that distinguish Modern English from the language of earlier periods only go to completion in the 18th and 19th centuries, so that the new corpus is needed for temporally complete investigations of the rise of Modern English. The new corpus will reinforce in several ways the growing influence of electronic corpora on the language sciences. First, the study of language change is being revolutionized, because corpora provide, in manageable form, the data needed for large-scale and precise investigations. Because the corpora are publicly available, common data resources, different analyses can be compared with a confidence and precision not previously possible. Second, the corpora permit historical work to interact more effectively with other areas of linguistics. Thus, recent discussions of the long-assumed connection between language change and language acquisition have been stimulated by corpus-based studies of the time course of language change. In addition, applied mathematicians have begun to use the detailed data that the parsed historical corpora provide to test dynamical systems models of how language change diffuses through a population. Third, in computational linguistics, the corpora are beginning to prove useful as test beds for automatic processors, especially syntactic parsers. Crucially, they include a wide range of genres and levels of syntactic complexity, unlike the present the standard test bed, the Penn Treebank. Because its syntax differs very little from Present-Day English, the proposed new corpus of Modern English will be particularly useful in this regard. Finally, parsed corpora are beginning to have an impact on undergraduate education in linguistics. They are used in undergraduate research courses, where learning to use them reinforces students' understanding of language structure while, at the same time, the corpora provide datasets for research projects. Because its language poses no linguistic barriers to understanding, the present corpus will be particularly useful for this purpose.