-
Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language Project: A methodological journey
Just before Christmas 2015, the AHRC announced that it was going to fund the £1 million Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language project. I actually had the idea for the project 20 years ago. The fact that it took so long has much to do with method. The approach I envisaged for Shakespeare’s language is analogous to…
-
Rude Britannia – what our politeness says about our nation
Britain is still a nation of polite people and fears that texts, tweets and Facebook are making people ruder is a myth, according to research from Lancaster University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS). The British are famous for their reserve, indirect way of saying things and a love of queuing. However, new research…
-
Politeness and impoliteness in digital communication: Corpus-related explorations
Post-event review of the one-day workshop at Lancaster University Topics don’t come much hotter than the forms of impoliteness or aggression that are associated with digital communication – flaming, trolling, cyberbullying, and so on. Yet academia has done surprisingly little to pull together experts in social interaction (especially (im)politeness) and experts in the new media,…
-
CASS Q&A: “Part suspended” versus “Partly suspended” on the London Underground
Last month, I received an interesting email about some terms that London commuters might be very familiar with: We at London Underground currently operate the electronic service update board which indicates the real-time status of each of our lines. Most of customers are familiar and use it daily. We currently use the phrases – good service,…
-
The neglected west: first-order politeness in Britain
“Teaching and Learning (Im)politeness: An International (Im)politeness Conference“, will be held at SOAS, University of London, 8-10 July. I will be giving a talk with Jim O’Driscoll (Huddersfield) on the topic below: Almost without exception, it is scholars based in “Western” locations that have introduced the ideas with pretensions to universal application which are commonly…
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.