A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English 1150–1325 (LAEME, Version 3.2)

The first publication of the first phase of LAEME, in the form of an interactive website, was a beta version in 2007. Version 2.1 ran from 2008–2013. This version, 3.2, contains substantial revisions of tagging following work on the related web resource A Corpus of Narrative Etymologies (CoNE). New functions have been added and others revised. In addition, the web pages have a new, simpler layout. LAEME presents information about the variation in space and time of linguistic forms found in early Middle English texts. Middle English is taken to cover the period ca. 1150-1325. LAEME is a ‘daughter’ atlas of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 1350-1450 (LALME), ed. Angus McIntosh, M.L. Samuels and Michael Benskin (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press; Edinburgh: Mercat Press) and deals with the period of written English immediately preceding that of LALME. A major revision of LALME (eLALME) was published, also as a website, in 2013. (The other ‘daughter’ of LALME and companion website to this one is A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS), which deals with variation in written Older Scots.)
LAEME contains:
1. A theoretical and methodological Introduction, defining the contents of LAEME, outlining our procedures and theoretical orientation, and defining the contents of the LAEME Corpus of Tagged Texts (CTT).
2. The LAEME corpus of lexico-grammatically tagged texts in searchable form in a database.
3. A searchable database (Index of Sources) containing information about the texts in the LAEME CTT.
4. A set of Tasks, with Task Keys describing their working, which allow you to search the databases.
5. A set of explanatory documents:
(a) Text Keys lists the LAEME corpus files by 1. file number; 2. filename; 3. region.
(b) Lexel Specifiers lists and explains the semantic and functional specifiers to the lexical elements of the LAEME tags.
(c) Grammel Commentary lists and explains the grammatical elements of the LAEME tags.

Linked to LAEME is a Corpus of Narrative Etymologies (CoNE), which aims to provide a narrative etymology for every form type in the LAEME CTT, along with a Corpus of Changes, which explicates the phonological, morphological and orthographic changes invoked in CoNE.
LAEME will allow you to:
1. search and retrieve linguistic data from its corpus of lexico-grammatically tagged texts
2. search and retrieve data from the Index of Sources
3. view maps showing the geographical distribution of linguistic features across space
4. make concordances

LAEME is based on the principles of medieval dialectology developed for LALME but uses a corpus-based methodology, providing an entirely new interactive and dynamic component. Complete texts (or large samples of very long texts) have been diplomatically transcribed from original manuscripts or facsimiles. Each Middle English word and each derivational and inflectional morpheme in the text is lexico-grammatically tagged. The present LAEME CTT consists of ca. 650,000 words tagged at this unprecedented level of detail, enabling investigations at all linguistic levels. Considerable editorial and textual commentary accompanies each tagged text.
From each tagged text is derived a text dictionary, which lists all the linguistic material in the tagged texts, arranged by lexico-grammatical tag. LAEME 3.2 also has 1,872 Feature Maps, for the most part directly comparable with their equivalent Dot Maps in eLALME.