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The first multigenre historical corpora of the English language were published in the early 1990s, almost thirty years after the first Present-Day English corpus was released in 1964. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC) came out in 1991, and the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (HCOS) in 1995. The introduction to the latter justifiably called it a ‘new tool’ (Meurman-Solin 1995). These tools were new in several respects. They provided systematically selected data on historical varieties of English, comprising closely matching genres from consecutive periods of time. They also made it possible to search texts using an extensive set of metadata, including period-, variety-, and writer-specific information. However, twenty years is a long time in the life of electronic data sources - long enough in fact to make the first Present-Day English corpora in the Brown Corpus family ‘historical’. Like these first synchronic corpora, the diachronic corpora of the 1990s were carefully designed but small. The Helsinki Corpus, for example, amounts to c. 1.5 million running words. Twenty years on, corpora of this kind are sometimes called ‘bijou’ corpora, in contrast to the hundreds of millions of words contained, for example, in COHA, a monitor corpus of historical American English (for more details on English historical corpora, see CoRD). This paper considers the various material and methodological issues in English historical corpus linguistics that have changed since the pioneering days twenty years ago. I will suggest a division of labour between ‘legacy’ corpora and their mega-sized successors, and discuss the trade-off between corpus annotation and corpus size.
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