  We present the first parsing results on the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of
Early Modern English (PPCEME), a 1.9 million word treebank that is an important
resource for research in syntactic change. We describe key features of PPCEME
that make it challenging for parsing, including a larger and more varied set of
function tags than in the Penn Treebank. We present results for this corpus
using a modified version of the Berkeley Neural Parser and the approach to
function tag recovery of Gabbard et al (2006). Despite its simplicity, this
approach works surprisingly well, suggesting it is possible to recover the
original structure with sufficient accuracy to support linguistic applications
(e.g., searching for syntactic structures of interest). However, for a subset
of function tags (e.g., the tag indicating direct speech), additional work is
needed, and we discuss some further limits of this approach. The resulting
parser will be used to parse Early English Books Online, a 1.1 billion word
corpus whose utility for the study of syntactic change will be greatly
increased with the addition of accurate parse trees.

Computation and Language