Sheffield Corpus of Chinese for diachronic linguistic study

The paper presents the outcome of the pilot phase of a major project which aims to build a digital resource for the study of historical Chinese texts with a view to facilitating linguistic analysis of the language, particularly from a diachronic point of view. The approach to general problems for a diachronic corpus is discussed. Details of the tag set and the tagging system devised are given. The development of a sophisticated automatic mark-up scheme for Chinese texts from widely different time periods and genres is indicated.