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5. CORPORA AND METHODOLOGY<br />

English (PPCEME; cf. Kroch, Santorini and Delfs 2004) and Early Modern English<br />

Medical Texts (EMEMT; Taavitsainen et al. 2010). A detailed description of both corpora<br />

is provided in what follows.<br />

5.1.1. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English<br />

The PPCEME is a syntactically annotated corpus of prose text samples, and is a useful<br />

resource for the study of nominalizations in the EModE period. It was compiled between<br />

1999 to 2004 and contains roughly 1.8 million words (in a total of 229 texts) subdivided<br />

into three directories: Helsinki, Penn 1 and Penn 2. The Helsinki directory comprises<br />

573,000 words. Both the Penn 1 and the Penn 2 are supplements to the Helsinki Corpus<br />

(see Kytö 1996), and whenever possible comprise samples taken from the same authors<br />

and editions found in the Helsinki Corpus. Penn 1 contains roughly 615,000 words, and<br />

Penn 2 approximately 606,000 words.<br />

The texts in PPCEME cover three different subperiods: E1 (1500 to 1570), E2 (1570<br />

to 1640), and E3 (1640 to 1710). All three subperiods contain samples of eighteen genres:<br />

Bible, Biography/Autobiography, Biography (other), Diary (private), Drama/Comedy,<br />

Educational Treatise, Fiction, Handbook (other), History, Law, Letters (non-private),<br />

Letters (private), Philosophy, Proceedings/Trials, Science/Medicine, Science (other),<br />

Sermons and Travelogue. Of these, the genres Science/Medicine and Science (other) have<br />

been selected for this study. At 118,235 words in total, they together represent 6.8% of the<br />

total word count of the whole corpus.<br />

132

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