Dear Christophe,

There are at least two corpora which contain non formal texts; letters from sixteenth until nineteenth century:

http://brievenalsbuit.inl.nl/zeebrieven/page/search

and

http://www.gekaaptebrieven.nl/

When I get to know more corpora, I will let you know! (I am also curious for which research you will consult these corpora...)

All the best,

Cefas van Rossem

Dear cefas,

Thank you for your suggestions. Actually I'm doing crosslinguistic research on the use of complex prepositions in English, Dutch and French. In order to have comparable data for the three languages, the corpora used must be comparable in terms of genre and type, in addition to covering the same time span. There are many corpora out there for Dutch, but as far as the Middle Ages and the Modern Era are concerned, much of the material consists of literary texts.

Dear Christophe,

Very interesting! (I have recently published anarticle on the preposition 'na' in Virgin Islands Dutch Creole. Perhaps of interest?) Are the corpora helpful? I hope so.

All the best,

Cefas

Dear Cefas,

They might be helpful, thank you. Many of the corpora I use can be donwloaded from the internet, which is an advantage if the aim is to quantify things and you want control over the data and the way you can process them. If you hear of such corpora for Middle Dutch or else Early Modern Dutch (charters, tracts, official or personal correspondence), please let me know.

BTW, my first interest is language contact, and I think French could be the epicenter for the diffusion of complex prepositions in English and Dutch. Glad to see people interested in language contact react to my questions!

Best regards,

Christophe Béchet.