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Celebrating the Written BNC2014: Lancaster Castle event
On 19 November 2021, The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) organised an event to celebrate the launch of the Written British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2024). The event was live-streamed from a very special location: the medieval Lancaster Castle. There were about 20 participants on the site and more than 1,200 participants…
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Talking Health Online
On 21 October 2021, the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science hosted a webinar entitled, “Talking Health Online: Why it matters and what linguistics can contribute”, as part of a series of events organised by the International Consortium for Communication in Health Care (IC4CH). The IC4CH is an initiative that brings together language…
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Meet our students: Masters in Corpus Linguistics
Lancaster University is very proud to offer MA and Postgraduate Certificate programmes in Corpus linguistics. The programmes aim to equip students with skills that will enable them to analyse large amounts of linguistic data (corpora) using cutting-edge computational technology. We asked our future students a few questions about their interests and motivation to study at…
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Launch of new project – Questioning Vaccination Discourse (Quo VaDis): A Corpus-based study
A new ESRC-funded project based in CASS will apply the methods of corpus linguistics to arrive at new understandings of vaccine hesitancy, which the World Health Organization lists among the top 10 global health challenges, and defines as ‘a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccination services’. Vaccine hesitancy is often…
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William Dance – Introductory Blog
My name is William Dance and I’m one of two new Senior Research Associates in CASS. I’m currently finishing my PhD in the linguistics department here and my main research interests are corpus approaches to deception and manipulation, using methods like (critical) discourse analysis to study online disinformation (better known as ‘fake news’). I’m working…
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Tara Coltman-Patel – Introductory Blog
My name is Tara Coltman-Patel and I am so excited to be a new member of CASS. I am working as one of the Senior Research Associates on the ESRC-funded Quo VaDis project: Questioning Vaccination Discourse: A Corpus-Based Study project, which explores discussions about vaccinations in UK parliamentary debates, UK national newspapers and on the…
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#LancsBox: The emerging historical linguist’s MO? A brief case study of Aramaic.
By: Charbel El-Khaissi I took Lancaster University’s free Corpus Linguistics course (Corpus MOOC) to fill time. Three months later, a doctoral research proposal enabled by #LancsBox, a software tool introduced in the course, was accepted at the Australian National University. For as long as this topic has been studied, ancient Semitic languages have relied on…
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British Muslims Caught Amidst FOGs – A Discourse Analysis of Religious Advice and Authority
By Usman Maravia In this blog entry, I will provide an overview of my latest article which explores the writing style of Islamic advice texts on COVID-19. The issues that were addressed in these advice texts were related to the topic of mosque closures, funerary rites, fasting during Ramadan, and suspending Friday and daily prayers…
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‘Face masks’ and ‘face coverings’ in the UK press during the Covid-19 pandemic: Scottish vs. national newspapers
Carmen Dayrell, Isobelle Clarke and Elena Semino (Lancaster University) 1 Introduction Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the use of face masks or face coverings as a means of reducing the transmission of the virus has been a major area of debate in many countries around the world. In the UK specifically, the first…
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Introductory Blog – Hanna Schmueck
I am very honoured to have received the Geoffrey Leech Outstanding MA Student Award for my MA in Language and Linguistics. This award traditionally goes to the MA student with the highest overall average. I started my postgraduate journey in September 2019 after finishing my undergraduate degree at the University of Bamberg (Germany) in 2018…
CASS Briefings
CASS: Briefings is a series of short, quick reads on the work being done at the ESRC/CASS research centre at Lancaster University, UK.