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Registration open for free upcoming event: “Language matters: communication, culture and society”
CASS is excited to announce an upcoming event at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester on Thursday 12th November from 4pm-9pm. “Language matters: communication, culture and society” is a mini-series of four informal talks showcasing the impact of language on society. The timely themes will be presented in an approachable manner that will be…
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The Spoken British National Corpus 2014 – project update
It has been little over a year since CASS and Cambridge University Press announced a collaboration to compile a successor to the spoken component of the British National Corpus, the Spoken BNC2014. This will be the largest corpus of spoken British English since the original, with the advantage of being collected in the 2010s rather…
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Swimming in the deep end of the Spoken BNC2014 media frenzy
As someone who enjoys acting in his spare time, I’m rarely afraid of the chance spend some time in the spotlight. But as I sat one morning a few weeks ago in my bedroom, in nothing but a dressing gown, about to do a live interview on a national Irish radio station, with no kind…
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Notes from the SILK Road International Summer School
In July 2014, I and four other students from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at Lancaster University (Sophie Barker, James Lester, Eleanor Richards-Johnson, and Gillian Smith) travelled to Hong Kong to attend the SILK Road International Summer School. The three week summer school, organised by Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), in affiliation…
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The Spoken BNC2014 project features in the Daily Mail
The recently announced collaboration between Cambridge University Press and CASS, the Spoken BNC2014 project, has made headlines in the Daily Mail. The article, entitled, “No longer marvellous – now we’re all awesome: Britons are using more American words because traditional English is in decline”, describes the preliminary findings of the project, which is in its…
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Summer at SILK Road
On Saturday 5th July I’ll be boarding a plane bound for Hong Kong once again this year, as I journey east for the SILK Road International Summer School. The programme, organised by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Faculty of Humanities, will put me and four other Lancaster University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences students…
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Dispatch from YLMP2014
I recently had the pleasure of travelling to Poland to attend the Young Linguists’ Meeting in Poznań (YLMP), a congress for young linguists who are interested in interdisciplinary research and stepping beyond the realm of traditional linguistic study. Hosted over three days by the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University, the congress featured over…
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The Twitter reaction to the sentencing of the Lee Rigby murderers – 26th February 2014
by Love, R., McEnery, T. & Wattam, S. Introduction The ESRC-funded Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University has undertaken some preliminary research into the immediate reaction on Twitter to the sentencing of the Lee Rigby murderers on Wednesday 26th February 2014. This document summarises our findings. Background On the afternoon…
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Notes from the 3rd annual Boya Forum 2013 Undergraduate Conference
If, six months ago, you had told me that an assignment I was writing during my undergraduate degree would eventually send me to China for the weekend, I wouldn’t have believed you. However, that is exactly what I found myself doing last weekend, when I travelled to Beijing Foreign Studies University to present at the…
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.