We are pleased to announce that Dr Carmen Dayrell (c.dayrell@lancaster.ac.uk) has joined the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science as the Senior Research Associate on the Changing Climates project. You can read a bit more about her in her own words, below.

My main research interests relate to the use of corpus methodologies to study language production, from various perspectives and in different settings.

I was first interested in the distinctive features of translated language and carried out a corpus study to investigate potential differences (and similarities) between collocational patterns in translated and non-translated texts of the same language. The main issue under my investigation was whether collocational patterns tend to be less diverse (i.e. reduced in range) in translations when compared to texts originally written in the language in question.

I then turned my attention to English academic writing and examined lexical and syntactical features of abstracts written in English by Brazilian graduate students, hence native speakers of Portuguese, from various disciplines. My primary goal was to provide insights for the development and improvement of teaching material that can directly target the specific needs of Brazilian novice researchers. This research project involved comparing the textual patterns used by students vis-à-vis those in abstracts taken from published papers from the same disciplines.

My current research focuses on the discourse of climate change in media coverage. This is part of a larger project which aims to conduct a large-scale, systematic empirical analysis of climate change discourse across Britain and Brazil. Our primary purpose is to investigate how the issue has been framed in these two countries in the past decade.

Qualifications

• PhD in Translation Studies, CTIS – The University of Manchester (UK)
• MA in Applied Linguistics, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG,Brazil)
• BA in Business Administration and Accountancy, Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais (PUC-MG, Brazil)

Selected Publications

DAYRELL, C. (2011a) ‘Corpora and academic English teaching: lexico-grammatical patterns in abstracts written by Brazilian graduate students’. Vander Viana and Stella Tagnin (Eds.) Corpora in Foreign Language Teaching. São Paulo: HUB Editorial, pp. 137-172. (in Portuguese)

DAYRELL, C. (2011b) ‘Anticipatory ‘it’ in English abstracts: a corpus-based study of non-native student and published writing’. Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski (Ed.) Explorations across Languages and Corpora. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp. 581-598.

DAYRELL, C. (2010) ‘Frequency and lexico-grammatical patterns of sense-related verbs in English and Portuguese abstracts’. Richard Xiao (ed.) Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 486-507.

DAYRELL, C. (2009) ‘Sense-related verbs in English scientific abstracts: a corpus-based study of students’ writing’. ESP Across Cultures 6: 61-78.

DAYRELL, C. (2008) ‘Investigating the preference of translators for recurrent lexical patterns: a corpus-based study’. Juliane House (ed.) Beyond Intervention: Universals in Translation?, TRANSKOM, First and Special Issue of TRANSKOM (1). Available at http://www.trans-kom.eu/.

DAYRELL, C. (2007) ‘A quantitative approach to investigate collocations in translated texts’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 12(3): 415-444.