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Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) |
Kontakt/Bestellung |
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Hrsg. v. Ian Lancashire |
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Online |
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Inhalt :: Content |
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Verlag :: Publisher |
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Preis :: Price |
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Das Angebot richtet sich nicht an Verbraucher i. S. d. § 13 BGB und Letztverbraucher i. S. d. Preisangabenverordnung. |
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Bestellnummer bei digento :: digento order number |
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Verlagsinformation :: Publisher's information Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) gives scholars unprecedented access to early books and manuscripts that document the English language from the beginning of printing in England to 1702. With over 150 monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries and glossaries (in which either source or target language is English), as well as linguistic treatises, and encyclopedic or topical work LEME provides exciting opportunities for research for historians of the English language. A half-million word-entries devised by contemporary speakers of early modern English describe the meaning of words, and their equivalents in languages such as French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and other tongues encountered then in Europe, America, and Asia. LEME offers: - searchable word-entries (simple, wildcard, Boolean, and proximity) - browsable page-by-page transcriptions of the lexicons, indexed by date, author, title, and subject - a selection-list of editorially-lemmatized headwords - lists of headwords unique to each lexical text in the database - bibliographies of over 1.200 primary lexical texts, and secondary historical and critical literature, with biographical information on lexicographers - introduction, help, and information on editorial procedures
LEME LEME is designed as a full-featured scholarly resource for original research into the entire lexical content of Early Modern English. The primary LEME database of lexical works, in the licensed version, also offers simple and advanced searches, including regular-expression and sub-string queries, and proximity and Boolean searches. The size of search contexts is adjustable. Queries on the lexical database may be restricted by date, author, title, type of lexical work, and subject. A complete word-list of the lexical database may be browsed. An index to over 1,200 known lexical works in the period may be searched by date, author, title, subject, and genre. There is also a biographical index. LEME offers, as well, a new documentary period database of over 10,000 works from the Early Modern era, generously donated by Early English Books Online/Text Creation Partnership. (This is available only to individuals or institutions already subscribing to EEBO/TCP.) Additional texts have been generously made available by the Women Writers Project, the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and Renascence Editions. Searches on the documentary database are not restrictable but there is a complete, browsable word-list of over 2.3 million strings for the period. There are two kinds of work in the LEME lexical database: analyzed and unanalyzed. The headwords of analyzed lexical works have been editorially lemmatized and segmented by headword, explanation, sub-headwords, sub-explanations, and cross-references. Lemmatization and segmentation enable us to restrict searches of analyzed lexical works by the usual modernized, lemmatized spelling of their headwords, and by the position of the words to be retrieved. Analyzed lexical works can also be displayed, page by page, entry by entry. Each analyzed word-entry has a permanent URL so that an online scholarly edition, dictionary, or critical work can cite a LEME word-entry in confidence that any online reader will be able to retrieve it. Unanalyzed lexical works cannot be displayed, searches on them are global rather than restrictable, and these word-entries lack any permanent URL. LEME often includes a lexical work, in advance of its analysis, because more readers will want the opportunity to search a lexicon than to read one, entry by entry, given that EEBO/TCP and several well-known facsimile series make the texts of historical lexicons available as books or images of books. There are advantages, however, in browsing a displayed and analyzed lexical text. A reader can select specific headwords and can bring up all other word-entries with the same headword and so compare how different lexicographers, over time, have commented on or used the word. Displays of printed books optionally give a link to Early English Books Online where an online facsimile of that text-page may be consulted. Readers can also list all normalized headwords that are unique to any one lexical work. Such lists identify headwords that either eluded most monolingual English lexicographers (perhaps they were an obvious term from the mother tongue) or that entered and left the language quickly. Knowing the position of a retrieved term in any word-entry is advantageous. For example, any term retrieved from a headword position in a monolingual English dictionary or glossary will usually be the direct subject of that entry. In this instance, a lexicographer explains an English word forthrightly, as Henry Cockeram (1623) does in the word-entry, "Death. Mortality." Any English term retrieved from the explanation position in a bilingual or polyglot lexicon, on the other hand, generally translates a foreign-language word. Such English terms are not the raison-d'être of the word-entry. That an English word corresponds to a foreign-language term helps us normally only if we understand that other language. The entry, "Castillo a castell," in John Thorius' rendering of a Spanish lexicon by Anthony de Corro, for instance, only helps us understand English "castell" if we know the meaning of the Spanish headword independently. Other corresponding English terms in the explanation segment of a bilingual lexicon, of course, are sometimes synonyms for the English word that is the subject of the query. However, the multiple senses of foreign-language words may bring together English terms in an explanation that are not semantically related in English itself. Consider John Florio's word-entry in 1598: Famigliare, to set vp houshold, to become familiar, to tame. Also familiar, tame, gentle, acquainted, conuersant, a houshold guest. When two people decided to live together in Elizabethan England, they did not necessarily intend to "tame" one another, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew notwithstanding. Collocational proximity of English words in the explanation segment of a foreign-language lexicon does not guarantee their synonymity. For this reason, LEME enables readers to limit searches to different genres of lexical works, such as hard-word dictionaries on the one hand, and bilingual and polyglot dictionaries on the other. A word is marked differently by different lexical genres. Are you interested in new words introduced into English from other tongues? Look at hard-word lexicons. Do you want to investigate the mother tongue? Consider the English words employed in bilingual and polyglot lexicons. Foreign-language dictionaries normally use common, well-accepted English words to explain foreign vocabulary. The licensed LEME database includes a large primary bibliography of over 1000 early works known to have lexical information about English. LEME at present thus holds somewhat under fifteen percent of the lexical works of the Early Modern period. This total does not include the multiple versions or editions through which any one of these texts went. The primary bibliography of all these lexical works -- not just lexical works in the searchable subset -- are indexed by author, title, date, subject, and genre. The bibliographical entries served by these indexes give an example of the lexical content of the work and as full a coverage of secondary literature about it as possible. Search requests for a term often give a reader hundreds of word-entries. Terms may occur anywhere in an entry; and some occurrences do not help much with its meaning. The Modern Headwords word-index and search in LEME gives the reader-in-a-hurry only those word-entries that explicitly explain the search-term. Modern Headwords retrieves word-entries that include, in the case of English, a headword in multiple alternate spellings, forms, and inflections. Headwords may be selected manually from a ready-made list. English ones can be retrieved both in alphabetical order and by part of speech: an advantage, because many identically-spelled word-forms are both nouns and verbs, or adjectives and nouns. The analyzed part of the lexical database, in this way, gives readers a way of reducing the quantity of word-entries retrieved, and at the same time of increasing their relevance. The Modern Headwords word-list resembles the collected headwords in a regular dictionary. It irons out some differences in structure and spelling that characterize words in the dictionary world in the centuries before lexicographical standardization. LEME processing of headwords for the Modern Headwords word-list has two stages: first we convert old-spelling forms into modern ones, and then we lemmatize modern spellings. LEME accepts the spelling of headwords in the Oxford English Dictionary as standard modern spellings because the Early Modern period lacks any accepted spelling system. This rule-of-thumb has some odd effects. It retains old spellings such as "murther" (which has a different OED headword from "murder") and abandons ones like "church-esset" (which becomes "church-scot"). Lemmatization reduces inflected forms to a standard inflection. For example, it converts all forms of a verb to the infinitive (except present participles that are used as nouns, and past particles that are used as adjectives), and the plural and genitive forms of a noun to the nominative case. Entering a search term oneself involves some guesswork as to spelling and inflection. I may look for "abalienating" and come up empty, although the infinitive form, "abaleanate," exists. To help readers find such elusive search terms, the licensed version of LEME offers three different word-lists for browsing and for selecting strings to search for: Modern Headwords (as for English lemmas), a LEME word-list (for all words, in whatever language, from the lexical works), and a period word-list (for all strings in the EEBO/TCP corpus). Readers browsing for search terms in a modernized edition of an Early Modern English work should use Modernized Headwords first. Readers using old-spelling editions should use the LEME or the period word-list to browse for search terms. Although LEME lexical works offer explicit information about Early Modern English vocabulary, all English writings of the period give implicit evidence of vocabulary size and word-meaning. The LEME period database offers a word-list of over 10,000 of these non-lexical texts, courtesy of EEBO/TCP. By comparing the complete word-list of LEME lexical texts with the complete word-list of the documentary database, we can get a more complete picture of the state of the language. How big was it, say, in Shakespeare's lifetime? Several answers to that question can be imagined. One could lemmatize all printed and manuscript English works surviving from those years and then count the lemmas (i.e., count the infinitive forms of verbs, the nominative singular forms of nouns, etc.). Another answer might simply conflate all spellings of the same inflected word-form and then count the total number of word-forms (i.e., all forms of a verb, no matter how inflected, so that "abalienate," "albalienates," "abalianated," etc., would be different words). EEBO/TCP texts are indexed as they are. That many strings in the period word-list are not genuine words but errors or inappropriately-split words, that is, substrings of words, does not in any way lessen their value. |
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