CETA in the Context of the Coruna Corpus

The Coruna Corpus (CC): a Collection of Samples for the Historical Study of English Scientific Writing is a project on which the MUSTE group has been working since 2003 in the University of A Coruna (Spain). It has been designed as a tool for the study of language change in English scientific writing in general as well as within the different scientific disciplines (excluding medicine) between 1650 and 1900. Its purpose is to facilitate investigation at all linguistic levels, although, in principle, phonology is not included among our intended research topics. At the same time, we believe that the CC is an excellent tool for the study of scientific register/style at particular moments in history: it also offers the researcher the chance to analyse how this 'specific English' behaves from a synchronic point of view. To allow for socio-linguistic research using these scientific texts, we have included, when possible, some personal details about the author of each sample and, even, about the work from which the sample has been extracted in a separate file. From a technical point of view, all the texts have been keyed in following the Text Encoding Initiative conventions and saved in the XML format. The use of an extended mark-up language will make wide distribution and exploitation possible. Moreover, in order to retrieve information from the compiled data, we have decided to create a corpus management tool. Loosely speaking, the Coruna Corpus Tool is an Information Retrieval system, where the indexed textual repository is a set of compiled documents that constitutes the CC.