"As good luck would have it,"-Research Update!

As promised I have an update for you! I've been researching, pretty heavily, grammar changes due to Shakespeare. Originally, I wanted to see if there was a corpus specifically tailored to Shakespeare. During this search I came across a few things. The first, are several articles that go into the grammar of Shakespeare. I'm still working my way through them and I'll post them when/if I find something of interest. The other thing I found was a website, "The Shakespeare Resource Center,"  http://www.bardweb.net/ which goes into details concerning Shakespeare's life and works. What piqued my interest, though, was the section detailing Shakespeare's grammar and speech. My initial reaction was 'JACKPOT!' I thought I had found my golden goose, so to say. But, it wasn't exactly what I was hoping to find in the way of a corpus. The information provided is exceptional and extremely informative and I find that it aids in my understanding of just how complex Shakspeare was. For instance, when detailing the SYNTAX  of the Shakespeare's language, it states that:

The most common simple sentence in modern English follows a familiar pattern: Subject (S), Verb (V), Object (O). To illustrate this, we'll devise a subject (John), a verb (caught), and an object (the ball). Thus, we have an easily understood sentence, "John caught the ball." This is as perfectly an understood sentence in modern English as it was in Shakespeare's day. However, Shakespeare was much more at liberty to switch these three basic components—and did, quite frequently. Shakespeare used a great deal of SOV inversion, which renders the sentence as "John the ball caught." This order is commonly found in Germanic languages (moreso in subordinate clauses), from which English derives much of its syntactical foundation.

This information got me thinking. I wondered if perhaps the creator of the website would have any information about a possible corpus referencing Shakespeare...or anything really that would help in my research. Soooo I took a gamble and decided to e-mail the creator of Bardwed, J.M. Pressley, and bombard him with my various questions. I was hoping, but not really expecting to hear back from him.

After a few days....

HE ANSWERED ME!

I know I was shocked and surprised to see a reply to my e-mail sitting in my inbox.  I may or may not have squealed and jumped around happily for a few moments, feeling smart and important.

Sadly, though, he didn't have any link or reference to a corpus for Shakespeare. However, he did have interesting suggestions. This is what the e-mail stated:


Hi, Kaleigh,

I think I get what you're looking for, and that may be a tall order for one
source. Trying to diachronically sum up over 400 years of linguistic changes
is a challenge in itself, and estimating usage frequency and impact could be
highly subjective on top of that.

There are a number of valuable resources, however, that may provide at least
parts of what you're looking for:

* The Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary
* World Shakespeare Bibliography (James L. Harner, editor)
* Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary (Alexander Schmidt, 1902)
* The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Marvin Spevack, 1973)
* The Language of Shakespeare (G. L. Brooks, 1976)

Cool! While I didn't find a corpus, I did find possible links to researching the grammar of Shakespeare thanks to Pressley! This man has certainly done his homework and his suggestions seem like exceptional ones. Right now I'm looking at the "Shakespeare Lexicon" by Schmidt and things are getting pretty interesting.

I think I'm going to write him back to get more information on his research and understand his method for creating Bardweb just a little better.

Wish me luck!