The aims of this project are (1) to create an electronic corpus of 1.5 million words of early Modern English text and (2) to use this corpus to improve our understanding of the syntactic changes that characterize the transition from Middle to Modern English. The proposed corpus will contain, in addition to the texts themselves, the grammatical information necessary for extensive syntactic analysis. The corpus will be compatible in format with the existing 1.25 million word Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2) and with the York Parsed Corpus of Old English currently under construction. At the end of the project scholars will have available in annotated electronic form a continuous sample of historical English from the earliest written texts to 1700. Among the linguistic changes that the early Modern English corpus will allow us and other scholars to address are: the loss of verb-second word order, which goes to completion in the early Modern period; the loss of so-called ``verb-to-INFL raising'', including the rise of periphrastic 'do'; and the rise of the modern English passive. In addition to its role in facilitating grammatical analysis, one major effect of the English corpus on future linguistic investigations will be to permit scholars to use statistical methods to study empirically the temporal dynamics of syntactic change.
