“Fall wheat”, “hard frost” and “heavy showers”. An investigation into the phraseology of early Canadian English

The paper investigates the phraseology typical of early Canadian English, by analyzing the most frequent 2-grams that emerge from a second-generation corpus of manuscript ego-documents written in rural Ontario, Canada, in the 19th and early-20th centuries – the Corpus of Canadian English Letters and Diaries (CCanDL). The analysis, which was conducted following a mixed-method approach that combines quantitative and qualitative methods, sheds light on the phraseology specific to early Canadian English, paying particular attention to what clues this gives to early Canadian culture and identity and to the distinct worldview that emerges from it.