Language and Linguistic Evidence in the 1641 Depositions

都柏林三一学院（Trinity College Dublin，以下简称TCD）的“1641年证词”（1641 Depositions）包括约4,000份个人陈述，其中主要是各阶层的新教男女讲述了他们在1641年天主教爱尔兰人叛乱爆发后的经历。由政府任命的专员收集的证人证词长达约20，000页，构成了一个尖锐争议的指控的主要证据，即叛乱始于对新教定居者的大屠杀。因此，这些材料一直是旷日持久的激烈历史争论的核心。 这些材料在近代早期欧洲其他地方是无与伦比的，为1641年叛乱的原因和事件以及17世纪爱尔兰、英格兰和苏格兰的社会、经济、文化、宗教、政治和语言历史提供了独特的信息来源。此外，这些证词生动地记录了各种殖民和“文明化”进程，包括新教在斯图亚特王国最偏远地区之一的传播，低地农业和商业实践的引入，以及当地人对这些发展的反应。早些时候，来自AHRC和IRCHSS的主要赠款赞助了证词的转录和数字化，目前的建议旨在探索如何创建一个计算机环境，使对历史和语料库语言学感兴趣的学者可以与历史学家和其他专家合作，1641年的证词，以目前不可能的方式，利用有效的语言技术开发的IBM的dumageware。该项目的主要目标是创建一个个性化的计算机环境，语言研究人员可以在其中对数字化的1641份证词进行复杂的发现，分析和可视化，并与这些资源的同事进行真实的合作。这项研究的长期成果有助于推动数字人文学科中语言和历史研究方式的革命。开发符合文本编码倡议（TEI）的语料库，并遵循解决互操作性问题的公认国际标准，将使该项目能够与其他关键的数字研究倡议联系起来，包括DARIAH和WARCHIN。这些证词以早期现代英语记录，提供了爱尔兰微观层面上语言变异的证据，在宏观层面上，它们表现为（准）法律的话语和屠杀话语。EME的可变性加上在证词中不断变化的声音，给语言学家（和计算机分析师）带来了特殊的挑战，需要大量的跨学科咨询。在该项目的总体目标范围内，具体的语言学目标如下：为爱尔兰的17世纪英语开发语言模型;开发17世纪英语、姓氏和地名的本体;调查在中介文本中本地化形态和词汇变体的可能性;研究17世纪世纪法律的话语，因为它是在文本中表示，特别注意话语的框架，因此，需要对证词中的证据的质量和性质进行语言评估;并调查证人证词中关于大屠杀、暴行和种族清洗的论述。从计算机科学到历史、暴行研究、语言学等各个领域的专家之间的广泛接触，以及工业界和学术界之间的广泛接触，是这项建议的一个突出特点，它取决于真实的知识交流和资源的加强。

The '1641 Depositions' in Trinity College Dublin (hereafter TCD) comprise some 4,000 personal statements, in which mainly Protestant men and women of all classes told of their experiences following the outbreak of the rebellion by the Catholic Irish in 1641. Collected by government-appointed commissioners, the witness testimony runs to approximately 20,000 pages, and constitutes the chief evidence for the sharply contested allegation that the rebellion began with a general massacre of protestant settlers. As a result, this material has been central to protracted and bitter historical dispute. This body of material, unparalleled elsewhere in early modern Europe, provides a unique source of information for the causes and events surrounding the 1641 rebellion and for the social, economic, cultural, religious, political and linguistic history of seventeenth-century Ireland, England and Scotland. In addition, the depositions vividly document various colonial and 'civilizing' processes, including the spread of Protestantism in one of the remotest regions of the Stuart kingdoms and the introduction of lowland agricultural and commercial practices, together with the native response to these developments. Earlier major grants from the AHRC and the IRCHSS have sponsored the transcription and digitization of the depositions, making them available online and amenable to analysis by a variety of scholars and thereby facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration.The current proposal aims to explore how a computer environment can be created in which scholars interested in historical and corpus linguistics can work collaboratively with historians and other specialists to interrogate the 1641 Depositions, in ways not currently possible, by exploiting effective language technology developed by IBM LanguageWare. The principal objective of the project is to create a personalised computer environment in which linguistic researchers can conduct sophisticated discovery, analysis and visualisation of the digitised 1641 Depositions, and collaborate in real time with colleagues on these resources. The long-term outcome of this research can help to drive a revolution in the way linguistic and historical research is conducted in the Digital Humanities. Developing a Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) compliant corpus and following accepted international standards that address interoperability issues will enable the project to link with other crucial digital research initiatives, including DARIAH and CLARIN.Recorded in Early Modern English, the Depositions provide evidence of linguistic variation in Ireland on the micro-level, while on the macro-level they represent (quasi-)legal discourse and the discourse of massacre. EME variability coupled with shifting voices in the Depositions present linguists (and computer analysts) with particular challenges and will require considerable interdisciplinary consultation. Within the overall aims of the project, the specific linguistic objectives are as follows: to develop language models for seventeenth-century English in Ireland; to develop ontologies of seventeenth-century English, surnames and place names; to investigate the possibility of localizing morphological and lexical variants in mediated text; to investigate 17th century legal discourse as it is represented in the texts, with particular attention to the framing of the discourse, leading to a linguistic assessment of the quality and nature of the evidence in the Depositions; and to investigate the discourse of massacre, atrocity and ethnic cleansing presented in the witness testimony. Extended contact between specialists in a variety of fields, from Computer Science to History, to Atrocity Studies, to Linguistics, and between industry and academia, is an outstanding feature of this proposal, which hinges upon real knowledge exchange andresource enhancement.