Abstract
This chapter aims to provide a brief overview of the types of diachronic corpora available for English, and outlines the steps to carrying out a diachronic analysis. To illustrate the practices of a diachronic corpus-based analysis, it focuses on a study on the frequency of intensifiers throughout Early Modern English. Corpora which are ordered systematically by temporal dimensions are called “diachronic corpora”. There is a wide range of historical corpora at the historical linguist’s disposal. Since the 1990s, large diachronic corpora, such as the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC), have been made available. The HC “is still the only truly long-diachrony structured corpus of English texts” with texts from as early as the eighth century to as late as the eighteenth century. For diachronic analyses of American English, the Corpus of Historical American English is an invaluable resource with over 400 million words covering two centuries.
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