Corpora and historical linguistics Corpora e linguística histórica

3.4 Interdisciplinary considerations
There has been an increasing interest in corpus linguistic techniques
among, for instance, literary scholars, discourse analysts, historians and
ethnographers. This interdisciplinarity is natural in view of the present trend
in historical linguistic research which emphasizes the influence of
extralinguistic factors on variation and change in the history of a language.
Large-scale text collections have proved useful especially for literary scholars
to work on but smaller corpora can also be useful objects of study. Corpora
containing full texts, such as the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse
and the Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable English Texts
offer valuable material for literary and socio-historical research. Electronic
editions such as the An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560-1760
(ETED) which make available transcriptions of early official documents are
of interest not only to historical linguists but also to legal and social historians.
Overall, the use made of electronic historical texts is diversifying, and
it would benefit the research community if collaboration were increased and
efforts pooled across disciplinary borders (WYNNE, 2010, p. 425). For instance,

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historical linguists have a lot to learn from the methodologies applied by social,
political, legal, cultural, and other historians, and from the results they have
obtained in their research. In terms of software and other developments,
historical corpus linguists should perhaps be more active about reaching out
and making their voices heard (CURZAN forthcoming). This would make
it easier to make innovative use of even resources that have not necessarily been
developed for linguistic research in the first place.