# CorpusSearch 2: a tool for linguistic research

CorpusSearch has been used to search Middle English, Old, Middle, and Modern English corpora, as well as corpora of Chinese, Korean and Yiddish. In order for CS to search a corpus it must meet the following formatting requirements:

1. Every sentence in the corpus must be completely parsed; that is, every word must be labeled and must be included within the outside brackets of some sentence.
2. Phrasal and part-of-speech labels may not contain a space or other white space character, nor may they begin with digits.
3. Constituents must be bracketed with parentheses -- "(" and ")" -- not with square brackets or other delimiters.
4. Every sentence must have a "wrapper", that is, an unlabeled pair of parentheses surrounding the sentence.

Below is an example of a sentence bracketed in accordance with these guidelines, using the labels of the PPCME2 and PPCEME. Note that CorpusSearch is indifferent to the choice of phrasal and part-of-speech labels.

> ( (IP-MAT (ADVP-TMP (ADV Then)) (NP-SBJ (D the) (N child)) (VBD became) (ADJP (ADJR happier) (CONJ and) (ADJR happier)) (E_S .)) )

For more information on corpus formatting for CorpusSearch see the CorpusSearch Users Guide.