ARCHER

ARCHER is a corpus of British and American English covering the period 1600-1999, originally compiled by Douglas Biber (NAU) and Edward Finegan (USC) in the early 1990s.

It is managed as an ongoing project by a consortium of participants at fourteen universities in seven countries, as follows:

• Department of English, Northern Arizona University (NAU)
• Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California (USC) – Department of English, University of Michigan
• Department of English, University of Helsinki – Department of English, Uppsala University
• Department of English I, University of Freiburg (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)
• Department of English, University of Heidelberg (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg)
• Department of English, University of Bamberg (Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg)
• Department of English Studies, University of Trier
• Department of English, University of Zurich
• Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Manchester
• Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University
• School of Education/School of English, University of Leicester
• Research Unit on Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization; Department of English and German, University of Santiago de Compostela

The current phase of the project, ARCHER 3.2, has corrected and expanded the corpus to 3.3m words. The VLCG team has added British legal texts for all periods from 1600 to 1999; a description of the legal component can be found in:

López-Couso, María José & Belén Méndez-Naya. 2012. “Compiling British English legal texts: A contribution to ARCHER”. In Nila Vázquez González (ed.), Creation and use of historical English corpora in Spain, 5-19. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.