A Corpus of Late Modern English Prose.

þ File list:

SPELLING                 List of abbreviations and non-standard spellings
GREEN   .JNL             Letters of John Richard Green (diary entry)
GREEN   .LTR             Letters of John Richard Green (letters, selection)
BELL    .LTR             Letters of Gertrude Bell (selection)
DOWSON  .LTR             Letters of Ernest Dowson (selection)
WEBB    .LTR             Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb (selection)
AMBERLEY.LTR             Amberley Papers (letters, selection)
AMBERLEY.JNL             Amberley Papers (diary entries, selection)

LMODEPRS.ARC             Archive file containing the full text of the
                         corpus indexed for WordCruncher.  Archive contains
                         LMODEPRS.BYB = spelling/abbrev list + full text, 
                         plus files LMODEPRS.BYA, LMODEPRS.BYC, LMODEPRS.BYF,
                         LMODEPRS.BYU, LMODEPRS.BYX used by WordCruncher

ARCE.COM                 Program for extracting files from archive

README                   This file, revision 7vi94

þ Copyright:
Compilation and coding (C) 1994 University of Manchester
    (Department of English Language & Literature).
Text of The Letters of Ernest Dowson 
    (C) Associated University Presses, NJ, USA.
The letters of Bell and the Webbs are out of copyright.
We believe the Amberley and Green texts to be out of copyright too,
having tried without success to trace copyright holders.
Please acknowledge the corpus in any published work that makes use of it.

þ Compilation:
Corpus constructed 1992-1994 by David Denison with the very considerable 
assistance of Graeme Trousdale and Linda van Bergen.
       Department of English,
       University of Manchester,
       Manchester M13 9PL, U.K.
       e-mail:  d.denison@man.ac.uk

þ Editions used:
Approx. 20,000 words in one randomly chosen block from each of:
Russell, Bertrand and Patricia Russell (eds.)  1937  The Amberley Papers:
    The Letters and Diaries of Lord and Lady Amberley, vol. 2, pp.512-71.
    London:  Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press.
Bell,Lady (ed.)  1927  The Letters of Gertrude Bell, vol. 1, pp.396-403;
    vol. 2, pp.404-55.  London:  Ernest Benn.
Flower, Desmond and Henry Maas (eds.)  1967  The Letters of Ernest Dowson.
    pp.110-59.  London:  Cassell.
Stephen, Leslie (ed.)  1901  Letters of John Richard Green.  pp.72-123.
    London:  Macmillan.
Mackenzie, Norman (ed.)  1978  The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb,
    vol. 1, Apprenticeships 1873-1892, pp.270-319.  Cambridge:  Cambridge
    University Press in cooperation with the London School of Economics
    and Political Science.

þ References:
Denison, David  1994  A Corpus of Late Modern English Prose.  In Merja
    Kyt”, Matti Rissanen and Susan Wright (eds.)  Corpora across the
    Centuries:  ... .  Amsterdam and Atlanta GA:  Rodopi.
Kyt”, Merja  1994  Manual to the Diachronic Part of the Helsinki Corpus
    of English Texts:  Coding Conventions and Lists of Source Texts,
    2nd edn.  Helsinki:  Helsinki University Press for Department of
    English, University of Helsinki.

þ Plain Ascii version:
All reference codes are contained within COCOA-style brackets enclosed by <>,
while editorial material is contained within various sorts of paired brackets,
following as far as possible the conventions of the diachronic part of
the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts.  Two subperiods are identified:
items dated 1860-1889 are coded as L86 and 1890-1919 as L89.
        The seven files of text are 8-bit (extended) Ascii files, created 
under DOS code page 850 (International English) but containing characters
common to most other code pages too.  Also unlike Helsinki, line length
is NOT limited and occasionally even exceeds 80 columns.
        Users may easily combine some or all of the files if desired, 
e.g. by the command
        copy amberley.ltr+bell.ltr+dowson.ltr+green.ltr+webb.ltr allfive.ltr

Alternatively, the Ascii file LMODEPRS.BYB can be used as is:  it has
sentence boundaries marked with |s (vertical bar + s), page boundaries
by |p, and books by |b.

þ WordCruncher version:
Users with the WordCruncher Viewer may prefer to use the LMODEPRS files,
where identical text and coding is stored in a single file for use with 
WordCruncher, with additional marking of sentence and page boundaries.
(Page boundary markers are always made to coincide with a sentence boundary.)
The spelling and text files are concatenated in the order shown above,
so that users can search either
    - the whole corpus
or, by the use of Bookmarks (which we have preset),
    - material from any one of the five editions
    - letters only, excluding journal entries
The lists of abbrevs/spellings can be referred to.  They are NOT indexed.
Nor is editorial and reference coding within <> or [].

To extract the WordCruncher version, change directory to the subdirectory 
where you wish to place the files.  Then assuming the distribution disk is 
in drive A:, enter
        a:arce a:lmodeprs
and all the files in the archive will be extracted to the current directory.
If you only wish to extract selected file(s), enter for instance
        a:arce a:lmodeprs lmodeprs.byb

To access from WordCruncher the "book" containing this corpus, 
run the NOMENU.BAT batch file so that the bookshelf version of WCV will load.
Once in WordCruncher, press Ins to insert a new book, then select LMODEPRS.