The York-Helsinki parsed corpus of Old English poetry (YCOEP)

Abstract

The York-Helsinki corpus of Old English poetry is a selection of poetic texts from the Old English section of the Helsinki corpus of English texts, annotated to facilitate searches on syntactic structure and lexical items. It is intended for the use of students and scholars of the history of the English language. The corpus contains 71,490 words of Old English text; the samples from the longer texts are 4,000 to 17,000 words in length. The texts represent a range of dates of composition and authors. The texts are syntactically and morphologically annotated. The size of the corpus is approximately 2.5 megabytes. The syntactic annotations enable the use to pose and answer questions about word order, consituent order, abstract structure, and syntactic and morphological characteristics of the texts in the corpus. The annotations are general-purpose and as theory-neutral as possible, while still incorporationg the insights of modern linguistic theory; they can be used by scholars with widely varying research interests. The best way to search the corpus is by using CorpusSearch, a search engline developed specifically for corpora annotated in this format. For a description of Corpus Search see: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/mideng/ppcme2dir/corpussearch.html.