Reviews

Abstract

The team of linguists affiliated with the English Department of the University of Helsinki have had a long tradition of diachronic corpus studies of English ever since they started compiling searchable text corpora in the early 1990s. A few years later they were organized into a special Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), continuing their efforts in creating new corpora of dialectal and specialist texts. Owing to their pioneering work the community of English historical linguists all over the world had access to searchable, albeit limited, diachronic corpora long before the Toronto complete Dictionary of Old English Corpus and the University of Michigan Middle English Compendium became available […].