Corpora and historical linguistics Corpora e linguística histórica

2.3 Tools for historical corpus analysis
The basic tools used by historical corpus linguists do not differ
essentially from those used for searching present-day material. Among these
tools are word lists and concordances, combined with more sophisticated
methods such as collocate, keyword, or n-gram (or lexical bundle or multi-
word expression) analysis. Search programs currently available on the market
are WordSmith Tools, MonoConc Pro, Corpus Presenter and Xaira. The last-
mentioned provides advanced graphical support for investigating results. The
powerful statistical computing and graphics program R can also be used to
process language data (). (For a useful discussion
of data retrieval software, see WYNNE, 2008).
Among the resources that provide a search engine of their own are, for
instance, the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English and the Parsed Corpus
of Early English Correspondence, which have been annotated for the purposes
of the CorpusSearch 2 program (index.html>), or the Corpus of Irish English, the Middle English Medical
Texts and the Early Modern English Medical Texts (parts of the above-
mentioned Corpus of Early English Medical Writing), and An Electronic Text
Edition of Depositions 1560–1760, which each come with a customised
Corpus Presenter application. Another solution has been opted for in the
Corpus of Historical American English which can be accessed via a search
interface allowing one to investigate, for instance, changes in the frequency of
words and phrases, parts of words, grammatical constructions and collocates.
Large-scale text collections (Lion, the Old Bailey Corpus) most often provide
a search engine of their own. As these collections were not primarily designed
for linguistic searches, applying the search engines to solve linguistic research
questions seldom works adequately. Overall, using search programs on

---

429
RBLA, Belo Horizonte, v. 11, n. 2, p. 417-457, 2011
historical data is not altogether unproblematic, especially as regards spelling
variation, a feature characteristic of pre-standard varieties (see 3.2).