Corpus of Early American Literature

The use of electronic corpora has become widespread in many subfields of linguistics, and English, perhaps to some extent owing to its status as a lingua franca, has been the trailblazer in this methodology. The first widely used electronic corpus, the Brown corpus, compiled in the 1960s, comprised American English texts, and as the field has advanced over the last decades, many of the pioneering corpora have consisted of English material. However, even though the selection of corpora is impressive and broad, the basic subject matter and the object of linguistic research, the English language, is a veritable leviathan to investigate, and there are still notable gaps in the coverage of the available corpora. The present paper introduces a corpus which is an endeavor to fill the existing gap in the selection of American English corpora.