摘要：The aim of this paper is to explore grammatical variation between early Modern
and Present-day English by means of computational devices. To that end, we
compare the automatic output which the English Constraint Grammar Parser
offers of an updated corpus of Renaissance texts and its corresponding modern
version. In the first half of the paper we give information about the technical
process; in particular, we focus on the description of the parser. The software
parses every constituent and associates it with a tag which provides morphological
information and dependency links (head-modifier/complement syntactic
relations). It is also equipped with a disambiguation tool which reduces the
number of the alternative morphosyntactic analyses of each lexical entry. The
second half of the paper is devoted to the evaluation of the results obtained after
the application of the parser to the Renaissance and the contemporary passages.
Since the parser’s lexicon is designed to cope with only contemporary
English, orthographic, lexical and morphological pre-edition has been necessary
so that the parser can deal with (an adaptation of) the Renaissance source.
By examining the instances exhibiting either unjustified ambiguity or parsing
failure we determine to what extent the morphosyntactic rules designed for
Present-day English can be suitably applied to earlier stages of the language.
