The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

30 The syntax of early Englishthough it deals with verbal constructions only and must be used with somecare. The chapters on syntax in the various volumes of The Cambridge HistoryofEnglish (Hogg 1999a; Blake 1992; Burchfield 1994; Romaine 1998; and Lass1999) give a good overview of work done so far. For Old English, we haveMitchell’s Old English Syntax (1985) and for Middle English, Mustanoja’s AMiddle English Syntax (1960). The picture emerging from the study of thesestandard works can be complemented with other secondary literature. A particularlyuseful source for summaries of the secondary literature on a varietyof constructions is Denison’s English Historical Syntax (1993). It will be found,however, that after these initial stages, the picture is still less than complete, andfurther textual work is needed. If one is interested in phenomena that are connectedto particular classes of lexical elements, the various concordances willyield valuable information. If one’s interest is in syntactic constructions,textual research, with or without the aid of corpora, is inevitable. For the dataemerging from all these types of sources, any researcher is advised to checkthem carefully against the text editions for their reliability, context and date.A recent development is computerized corpora. The Helsinki corpus (Kytö1991) contains extracts of representative texts from all genres throughout thehistory of English until 1700. This can be searched for lexical strings.Grammatically tagged subcorpora, which are particularly valuable for syntacticresearch, of the Old English and Middle English parts of the Helsinkicorpus are currently in production. The Old English prose part of the Helsinkicorpus is being tagged morphologically at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdamby several of the authors of this book and Frank Beths, and is being extendedwith larger files of prose. The morphologically tagged output of this corpus istagged for constituent structure at Geneva and York by Eric Haeberli andSusan Pintzuk. The Old English poetry is being tagged in another ongoingproject at the University of York by Susan Pintzuk and Leendert Plug. At theUniversity of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the Middle English prose part ofthe Helsinki corpus is being tagged for constituent structure by AnthonyKroch and Ann Taylor, and is being further supplemented. These enrichedcorpora are available online, as far as they are ready. For Middle English, verysubstantial sources can be found in the Middle English Compendium, availableonline at the University of Michigan. This contains The Middle EnglishDictionary online, and a number of Middle English texts in full.1.4.1 How to handle dataAs observed above, we have to be aware of the restricted evidentialstatus of our historical data. Nevertheless, the data can give us a good deal ofinformation about the development of particular constructions.