CMSW held a symposium on Variationist Corpora Online on the 22nd and 23rd of May, 2009. Around 40 guests and speakers joined us for two days of sessions and discussion panels.
To celebrate the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns’ birth, CMSW is making available various electronic versions of the Kilmarnock edition of Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect.
We are currently creating a Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW) covering the period 1700-1945. This will complement the SCOTS corpus which covers 1945 to the present day. Like SCOTS, CMSW will be a publicly accessible, digitised corpus, which will be able to be browsed and searched over the internet. The resource will make available digital images of texts and searchable transcriptions.
The content of CMSW will mainly be written texts, though we hope to be able to obtain some early 20th century recordings. Texts will be selected on the basis of date and genre. Some texts will be chosen as ‘written records of speech’, e.g. minutes of meetings and transcripts of court proceedings. Other genres will include personal writing, expository prose, verse/drama, journalism, and writing by orthoepists or commentators on language.
As far as is possible for historical texts, texts will be tagged for sociolinguistic variables, to be included in the searchable metadata. Texts will be sourced from university and public libraries and archives. The aim is to have a representative sample of text types, broadly comparable to that of the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (HCOS).
The development of English in Scotland has long been a controversial topic, to the extent that even the language labels are contested. The Modern Scots period is conventionally dated from 1700 to the present day. It therefore begins with the last stages of the standardisation of written English, as well as the onset of the ‘Vernacular Revival’ in literary Scots that produced writers like Robert Burns.
Language use in Scotland in the modern period can be described as a continuum with Standard English at one end, and social and regional varieties of Broad Scots at the other. Writers vary their performance along that continuum, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on their social background and the context of writing. It is generally thought that out of the interaction between Broad Scots and written Standard English, the hybrid prestige variety of today’s Scottish English emerged.
However, there has been comparatively little study of how this happened, beyond some detailed analysis of the evidence of spelling reformers of the 18th century, mainly in relation to changes in pronunciation of the period. By creating a searchable digital archive of Scottish writing from this key period, we lay the foundations for a new account of language development in Scotland. Initial research using this resource will focus on the vexed issue of spelling variation.
In comparison with the period post-1700, the Older Scots period (1375-1700) is well-served, with studies of Anglicization during this period supported by the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, and the ongoing development of various sub-corpora of correspondence in Older Scots. The CMSW project will break new ground by filling the chronological gap between the HCOS and the SCOTS resources, thus making available to scholars and others a complete historical record of a major language variety whose development parallels and interacts with Standard English.
Within the project time-frame, the linguistic research aims to account for the structures of Modern Scots orthography, with a view to enhancing automatic identification of spelling variants. This groundwork will lead to further linguistic analysis, for example of the relationship between orthography and phonology, to what extent Modern Scots orthography is lexicalised in different phases within the period, and how particular orthographies are motivated by stylistic or philological intentions on the part of the author.