Chapter 5 - Rationale

Summary

Chapter 5 summarises the empirical rationale used to develop my method of analysis, departing from a new model of graphemic variant analysis, created with the purpose of analysing graphemic developments systematically across Early Modern English texts. The discussion presents the new model of analysis as a solution to some of the conceptual flaws existing in traditional approaches to studying spelling variation diachronically, and illustrates how these limitations may hinder a realistic appreciation of spelling standardisation. The basic principle behind the search tool is that of co-occurring variation, namely occurrences of the same word where a given spelling unit appears in alternation with another spelling unit in the same character position. The identification of variant words is informed by the EModE vocabulary database, a complementary tool created using all of the corpus material transcribed to date with reliable spelling. The chapter also explains why searches conducted in my case studies were instructed with internal parameters, which afford a systematic identification of individual words during analysis, while always retaining original spellings.