Corpus of Oz Early English (COOEE)

Material to be included had to meet with a regional and a temporal criterion. The latter required texts to have been produced between 1788 and 1900 in order to become eligible for COOEE. It was mandatory for a text to have been written in Australia, New Zealand or Norfolk Island. But in a few cases, other localities were allowed. For example, if a person who was a native Australian or who had lived in Australia for a considerable time, wrote a shipboard diary or travelled in other countries.

Project leader: Dr Clemens Fritz, Free University of Berlin
Time of compilation: 1998–2004
Size: 2,000,000 words
Language: English
Number of texts/samples: 1353
Period: 1788–1900
Released: 2004

Reference lines and copyright

The corpus has been compiled by the author as part of a doctoral thesis on the origins of Australian English:

Fritz, Clemens. 2007. From Early English in Australia to Australian English 1788-1900. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

The sources have been taken from published texts (online and offline) and from Australian archives, e.g. the Mitchell Library in Sydney. The texts are not copyright free, so they may not be republished in full nor in part, but they can be used for academic purposes, such as corpus linguistics. For this reason the corpus is available on request from the compiler (clemens.fritz@gmx.de).

Manual

A detailed description of the corpus can be provided on request.

Compiler

Dr. Clemens Fritz

Availability

Available by arrangement with the compiler.

Technical information

The texts are in txt-format and can subdivided by gender, status, period, text type, origin of writer and place of writing.

CoRD Entry submitted on January 3, 2010 by Dr Clemens Fritz.
Information for the entry was edited by Dr Fritz.