Preface

Carla Suhr and Irma Taavitsainen
Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), University of Helsinki

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, the first comprehensive historical corpus of the English language, the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts, and Change in English (VARIENG) organised a conference on the development and use of English historical corpora, the Helsinki Corpus Festival. The programme included a pre-conference event on developing corpus methodology for historical pragmatics on Wednesday 28 September, 2011. The response to our call for papers was so good that we continued the workshop as a parallel section of the conference, and enjoyed excellent presentations that illustrated the many intersections of historical pragmatics and corpus linguistics. Contributions dealt with pragmatic research tasks and corpus methodology, highlighted innovative methodological applications, and demonstrated how different corpora can be combined for improved results. This volume presents a selection of the papers from the workshop.

We would like to thank all participants of the workshop for making it such a success, whether as presenters or as members of the audience. Our thanks also go to all the contributors to this volume for their papers, and for making sure that this volume can be published in just a year after the workshop. We are indebted to the many anonymous scholars who gave unstintingly their time for reviewing the contributions. We are also grateful to Ville Marttila for filming and editing the video clips as well as for permission to use his photograph of an early printed book, to Toshiyaki Takamiya  for permission to reproduce an image of the Chauliac manuscript in his possession, and to Andreas H. Jucker for permission to reproduce his photographs of the Globe theatre and the Shakespeare portrait at Madame Tussauds; we are also grateful for their permission. We would like to thank Tanja Säily for the photograph below. Finally, we would like to express our heartfelt thanks to Joe McVeigh, the web editor of the series, for his excellent editorial work and his generous help in the final stages of the publication of this volume.

Helsinki, October 2012