ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2, I set out the case that the MC and the BWC, thanks to the methods and motives of Mayhew and of Harrisson and the M-O team, give us unusually vivid insights into vernacular language of the past. While the MC and the BWC may have some unique qualities, they are not totally unique as sources of insights into historical spoken language, as I discovered in the course of doing this research. There are other corpora, and other sources to which we can turn, the merits and potential of which are discussed in this chapter. Brief consideration of these corpora allows us to consider the range and quality of historical speech-related data available to the corpus linguist and will allow us later to assess the strengths and limitations of the BWC and the MC in relation to these sources. These corpora and other documentary sources provide samples of speech-like data from every century from the 15th to the 21st. The advantage of having these historical corpora and sources at our disposal will be evident in Chapters 7 and 8 when we address continuity and obsolescence in vernacular grammar directly.
