Books about birds

During the last decades, linguistic research has increasingly started to focus not only on how humans are interacting with each other but also on how they are interacting with other species. This has also sparked investigations of the way animals are depicted in discourse. Amongst others, animals are portrayed as objects of commodities, nuisances, but also as companions. Apart from that, animals can be objects of observation, for example, when they are described in nature guidebooks or wildlife documentaries. This chapter investigates linguistic descriptions of birds and bird types in British bird guides from the 19th to the 20th century. We first provide a summary on the development of ‘books about birds’ and on animal discourses, with a particular focus on discourses about animals. Next, the main emphasis lies in the introduction of the Bi rdC orpus (BIRPUS), a newly compiled collection of texts about birds from 1840 to 1920. In a case study, we show how BIRPUS can be used to investigate the textual profiles of birds and bird types from a historical perspective by drawing on n-gram and collocation analysis.