Basic structure of the Corpus of Historical English Law Reports
There are 185 files (369 texts) in CHELAR, yielding a total of 463,009 words. All the text files consist of law reports, a type of legal document which is representative of expository, writing-based discourse.
The corpus is structured into nine subperiods starting in 1535 and ending in 1999, so as to enable diachronic comparison. Table 1 shows the overall structure.
Table 1. Overall structure of CHELAR and word counts
| Subperiod |
Number of words |
Number of files |
Number of texts |
| 1950–99 |
50,662 |
20 |
20 |
| 1900–49 |
50,816 |
20 |
21 |
| 1850–99 |
51,447 |
20 |
24 |
| 1800–49 |
52,350 |
20 |
32 |
| 1750–99 |
51,084 |
20 |
21 |
| 1700–49 |
50,465 |
20 |
22 |
| 1650–99 |
51,019 |
20 |
30 |
| 1600–49 |
52,185 |
22 |
112 |
| 1535–99 |
54,337 |
23 |
87 |
| Total |
463,009 |
185 |
369 |
|
|
|
