A Corpus of Irish English 14th – 20th c. (CIE)

(Entry based on the http://www.uni-due.de/IERC/CIE.htm)

A Corpus of Irish English gathers together the main documents for the English language in Ireland throughout its history. These begin in the early 14th century and continue up to the present-day. There are various genres represented in the corpus, reflecting the diversity of text types to be found in the history of Irish English: poetry, glossaries, sketches and full-length plays. The material has been arranged so as to be displayed in an intuitive fashion within Corpus Presenter, a program suite by the present author with which you can examine the files of A Corpus of Irish English. With Corpus Presenter you can browse through the files of the corpus by just clicking on the nodes of the tree you are presented with. You can also, of course, begin working straight away and carry out retrieval tasks concerning matters of interest to you within the context of Irish English.

The present corpus has been assembled with the intention of placing the majority of available texts for Irish English from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century at the disposal of interested scholars. The corpus encompasses a number of genres, from 14th century poetry to drama in the modern period with additional material such as glossaries of dialect material and a regional novel from the early 19th century (Castle Rackrent). The material stems both from Irish and non-Irish authors. The latter form a group of writers who attempted to represent Irish English in fictional prose. The most famous of these is Shakespeare who in the Four Nations Scene from Henry V has an Irish character (Captain Macmorris) with salient features of 16th century Irish English. Of equal interest are the attempts of Irish writers during the 19th and early 20th centuries to render the speech of rural and urban inhabitants in as realistic a manner as possible hence the inclusion of plays by Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw and Sean O´Casey.

Project leader:Raymond Hickey

Project host: Universität Duisburg-Essen, Irish English Resource Center
Language: Irish English
Number of texts/samples:70 texts with a time span of nearly 600 years
Period: 14th c - present
Released: 2003, together with Corpus Presenter

Reference lines and copyright

A Corpus of Irish English. Compiled by Raymond Hickey and contained in: Hickey, Raymond 2003. Corpus Presenter. Software for language analysis.. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 292 pages with CD-ROM.

Manual

Hickey, Raymond. 2003. Corpus Presenter. Software for language analysis with A Corpus of Irish English. John Benjamins. (book + cd)

Compilers

Raymond Hickey

Availability

On CD, from compiler.

Corpus Presenter : http://www.uni-due.de/CP

CoRD Entry submitted in 2013.
Information for the entry was edited by Emanuela Costea.

Approved by Dr Raymond Hickey.