Corpus Description

HeidelGram is a corpus of British grammar books which is currently being compiled at Heidelberg University.

The main aim of this project is to compile a representative XML-annotated corpus of British grammar books of the 16th to 19th centuries (100 grammar books, ca. 10 mio. words). XML-markup includes the linguistic levels of description and single grammar topics, as well as references to other authors and grammars, and all kinds of evaluative statements on language norms and language use.

Currently, we are compiling a 19th-century pilot corpus of approximately 3 mio. words. It comprises 40 grammar books, including all the major titles.

The annotation of references and evaluative and normative expressions will enable us to build a network of authors and grammars, which shows the authors' attitudes towards language use and language change, reflects their standing in the linguistic community, and gives evidence of the innovative or conservative character of their grammar books.