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British National Corpus 2014: A sociolinguistic book is out
Have you ever wondered what real spoken English looks like? Have you ever asked the question of whether people from different backgrounds (based on gender, age, social class etc.) use language differently? Have you ever thought it would be interesting to investigate how much English has changed over the last twenty years? All these questions…
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Learn about the BNC2014, scan a book sample and contribute to the corpus…
On Saturday 12 May 2018, CASS hosted a small training event at Lancaster University for a group of participants, who came from different universities in the UK. We talked about the BNC2014 project and discussed both the theoretical underpinnings as well as the practicalities of corpus design and compilation. Slides from the event are available…
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Sketch Engine and other tools for language analysis
Here’s some good news for the beginning of the term: all Lancaster University staff and students have now access to Sketch Engine, an online tool for the analysis of linguistic data. Sketch Engine is used by major publishers (CUP, OUP, Macmillan, etc.) to produce dictionaries and grammar books. It can also be used for a…
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Morphological complexity: How is grammar acquired and how do we measure this?
Vaclav Brezina and Gabriele Pallotti Inflectional morphology has to do with how words change their form to express grammatical meaning. It plays an important role in a number of languages. In these languages, the patterns of word change may for example indicate number and case on nouns, or past, present and future tense on verbs.…
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Chinese Applied Corpus Linguistics Symposium
On Friday 29th April 2016, Lancaster University hosted a symposium which brought together researchers and practitioners interested in Chinese linguistics and the corpus method. The symposium was supported by the British Academy (International Mobility and Partnership Scheme IPM 2013) and was hosted by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS). The symposium…
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Syntactic structures in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus
We are proud to announce collaboration with Markus Dickinson and Paul Richards from the Department of Linguistics, Indiana University on a project that will analyse syntactic structures in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus. The focus of the project is to develop a syntactic annotation scheme of spoken learner language and apply this scheme to the Trinity…
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Trinity Lancaster Corpus at the International ESOL Examiner Training Conference 2015
On Friday 30th January 2015, I gave a talk at the International ESOL Examiner Training Conference 2015 in Stafford. Every year, the Trinity College London, CASS’s research partner, organises a large conference for all their examiners which consists of plenary lectures and individual training sessions. This year, I was invited to speak in front of…
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What can corpora tell us about learning a foreign language?
During our ESRC Festival of Social Science “Language Matters: Communication, Culture, and Society” event, CASS Senior Research Associate Vaclav Brezina tells us about his research into foreign language learning.
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Trinity Lancaster Spoken Learner Corpus: A milestone to celebrate
On Monday 19 May we came together to celebrate the completion of the first part of the Trinity Lancaster Spoken Learner Corpus project. The transcription of our 2012 dataset is now complete and the corpus comprises 1.5 million running words. The Trinity Lancaster Spoken Learner Corpus represents a balanced sample of learner speech from six…
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Is this the way to do Corpus Linguistics? Feedback system for the Corpus Linguistics MOOC
Corpus linguistics (CL) is a set of incredibly versatile methods of language analysis applicable to a number of different contexts. So, for example, if you are interested in language, culture, history or society, corpus linguistics has something to offer. Today, thanks to the amazing development in computer technology, corpus linguistic tools are literally only a…
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.