In 1991, Christian Mair took the initiative to compile a set of corpora that would match the well-known and widely used Brown and LOB corpora with the only difference that they should represent the language of the early 1990s. The project started in April 1991. To speed up the process of compilation, Christian Mair was granted additional funding by the DFG (German Research Foundation) for the years 1994-1996 within the Sonderforschungsbereich (special research group) 321 ‘Orality and Literacy’.
We would like to thank the large number of people who have been working on the project. The following have all been involved in the often tedious process of typing the text-extracts and/or the proofreading: Birgit Felleisen, Heike Fiedler, Elke Frings, Elke Gebhard, Dorothee Graf, Ulrike Günther, Matthias Kaufmann, Manfred Krug, Christoph Lindner, Isolde Mattmüller-Ofori, Nadja Nesselhauf, Christine Oesterlee, and Heike Schnitzler. Heike Fiedler helped in the final stages of proof-reading and the editing of this manual.
Special thanks are to Christoph Lindner who wrote the programme that we used in assigning the category references and line-numbers to the ASCII-texts, and to Heide Peper-Ludwig, our main troubleshooter in computer-related emergencies.
February 1998