Prototypical text categories
All text types are not represented in all subperiods in the Helsinki Corpus. Furthermore, the amount of text representing a certain genre may be too small to support conclusions, particularly if low-frequency items are studied. To diminish the disadvantages of this lack of symmetry, the types of text have been grouped into the following larger entities called diachronic text prototypes.
| statutory (STA) |
law, document* |
| secular instruction (IS) |
handbook, science (astronomy*, medicine*), philosophy*, educational treatise* |
| religious instruction (IR) |
religious treatise*, homily, rule, preface*, sermon |
| expository (EX) |
science (astronomy*, medicine*, other), educational treatise* |
| nonimaginative narration (NN) |
history, biography (saint's life, autobiography, other), religious treatise*, Middle English secular lyric*, travelogue*, diary |
| imaginative narration (NI) |
fiction, romance, travelogue*, geography |
| *) not all representatives of the type of text in question belong to one and the same prototypical category |
At least a few samples representing each of these six categories can be found in Old, Middle and Early Modern English. The distinction between secular and religious instruction is useful in view of the Old and Middle English samples; “imaginativeness” separates fiction, romances, etc., from, e. g., histories and biographies. Two important categories, argumentation and description, are missing, because it would have been difficult to find Old and Middle English texts in which these categories did not overlap with the others mentioned above.
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