The Corpus of Polish Dramatic Texts (1772–1939) – A New Tool for Research on Language and Communication in the Past

The article presents key information about the new tool for research on language and communication in the past, The Corpus of Polish Dramatic Texts (1772–1939), referred to by the article by the acronym KorTeDa (https://korteda.clarin-pl.eu). The authors offer a concise overview of the KorTeDa's sources, describing the collected texts, their metadata and the presentation of frequency data within the corpus. The article explains how the corpus's implemented search engine functions and highlights the specific type of annotation applied to the collected dramas, namely sociolinguistic annotation. The KorTeDa was developed for a specific linguistic purpose: investigating the 18th- and 19th-century colloquial Polish language. The unique feature of this corpus is the annotation of all dialogue and monologue utterances with values for three sociolinguistic variables (age, gender, and social status). The final part of the article demonstrates how KorTeDa is used in historical linguistics research on discourse markers.