In this chapter, we address some ways in which the use of corpora has revolutionised the study of the history of English. We first account for the development of historical corpora of English and discuss advantages and drawbacks associated with different corpus sizes. We also address types of language use that are not well represented in existing corpora, potential clashes between comparability and representativity, and features such as tagging and spelling normalisation. We then consider contributions that historical corpora have made to specific linguistic fields, notably in variationist studies, historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics, and illustrate historical corpus methodology by presenting a case study on sentence-initial and in Late Modern English based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). We conclude the chapter with a list of desiderata for future corpus-based research on the history of the English language.

The existential there-construction typically features prominently in studies of non-canonical syntax (e.g., Birner & Ward 1998), both from a synchronic and from a diachronic perspective. Current approaches within the World Englishes paradigm are mostly concerned with (non‑)concord or default singulars in the existential clause, as in there’s bears back there (Walker 2007; Collins 2012), a phenomenon that is by no means absent from earlier stages of English. This chapter makes use of the rich data represented by the Old Bailey Corpus 2.0 (1720 to 1913) to zoom in on developments within the existential construction in Late Modern English, a period which combines relatively little syntactic change in comparison to earlier periods of English with extensive activities in the realm of codification (cf. Leonard 1962; Sundby et al. 1991; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008). Two case studies probe into the tension between language change from above and below with respect to the occurrence of default singulars in existential constructions, highlighting some of the many aspects of non-canonicity that intersect in the variable realisation of this particular construction.

This is the main methodology and first-results chapter. It opens with an introduction to the lexeme-based approach used for the investigation, contrasting this to previous, variationist approaches. The chapter proceeds to explain the data retrieval and screening processes and presents an overview of the data, the nearly 65,000 intensifier tokens found in the corpus, across the three main categories (maximizers, boosters, downtoners), and the descriptive results across time for the most frequent items. The word counts of the different sociopragmatic groups of speakers (divided by speakers’ role in the courtroom, gender and social class) are introduced, as well as the diachronic distribution of intensifiers across the genders and social classes. Results are presented within the descriptive statistics framework, but the chapter also briefly introduces the regression model, or the inferential, multivariate statistical method to be used in Chapters 8–11 to disentangle the complex interplay of the sociopragmatic variables of speakers on the use of intensifiers.

This chapter concludes the book by summarizing the main results and discussing future prospects of study.