## The Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence

The Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC) is based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) , compiled at the University of Helsinki by the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English. The PCEEC contains over three-quarters of the original CEEC:

- 84 letter collections
- approx. 2.2 million words
- 4970 letters.

Note that there is a small overlap between the PPCEME and the PCEEC. Users of both corpora should be careful not to include the same data twice.

The Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) was compiled for the study of social variables in the history of English. To enable this, great attention has been paid to the authenticity of letters on the one hand and to the social representativeness of the writers on the other. The timespan covered is from c. 1410 to 1695. Because of widespread illiteracy, however, only the highest ranks of society are well represented, and women's letters form no more than one fifth of the full CEEC. For more information on the compilation principles see Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (eds.) (1996) and Keränen (1998).

The annotation scheme for the PCEEC is the same as that used by the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English 2 (PPCME2) and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME).

### References

Keränen, Jukka 1998. "The Corpus of Early English Correspondence: Progress report" in Explorations in Corpus Linguistics, Antoinette Renouf (ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi. 29-37.

Kirby, Joan (ed.) 1996. The Plumpton letters and papers. Camden Fifth Series 8. London: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society.

Kytö, Merja (comp.) 1996. Manual to the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. Coding conventions and lists of source texts. 3rd edition. Department of English, University of Helsinki.

Lyell, Laetitia (ed.) 1934. A mediaeval post-bag. London: Jonathan Cape.

Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, (eds.) 1996. Sociolinguistics and language history. Studies based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Language and computers 15. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi.