摘要：The 19th century was an age of exploration and new discoveries; yet the English
language in that period remains largely an unexplored territory. Happily, over
the past few years we have witnessed an increasing interest in late Modern
English.1 We have also seen a growing number of corpora being compiled and
becoming available for various periods of the history of English. However, we
still need access to corpora covering the 19th century.2 There are several ways in
which such corpora would be useful. First of all, they could provide the data
necessary for carrying out follow-up studies to research done on early Modern
English. This would be valuable for a number of syntactic studies, for instance
on the distribution of modal auxiliaries and relative pronouns, various ways of
expressing future time, and the development of the progressive form. In order to
serve this function, however, the corpus would have to be compiled with a crossgenre
perspective in mind, providing the researcher with texts stratified according
to extralinguistic criteria roughly comparable to, for instance, the Helsinki
Corpus of English Texts.
