-
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…
-
Remembering Richard Xiao, 1966-2016
I first met Richard in 2000, when he came to Lancaster to be my PhD student. Interested initially in doing a PhD in the area of translation studies, I spoke to him about corpus research and, slowly as the months passed, he decided to use corpora to look at an interesting issue in linguistics –…
-
Spoken BNC2014 meets FOLK
On Thursday 3rd December I visited the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Institute for German Language) in Mannheim. The IDS is Germany’s national, non-university institution for the research and documentation of the German language in both the present day and the past. I was thrilled to be invited there by Swantje Westpfahl, a PhD student at…
-
Beyond the checkbox – understanding what patients say in feedback on NHS services
In 2016 I will be working on a new project in CASS, which has received funding from the ESRC (£61,532 FEC). The purpose of this project is to help the National Health Service better understand the results of patient feedback so that they can improve their services. The NHS gathers a great deal of user…
-
Language Matters: Communication, Culture and Society
On 12th November, the CASS team made their way over to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester for the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2015. The theme for this year’s event was “Language Matters: Communication, Culture and Society,” and it featured a series of four informal talks by CASS researchers based at Lancaster. The…
-
Participants needed for EEG experiment!
For my PhD I am trying to find out how language is processed in the brain by combining methods from corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics. Specifically, I have extracted real language data from the British National Corpus and modified this data so that it can be presented to participants in an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment. In EEG…
-
Does it matter what pronoun you use?
Historically, in British English at least, if you didn’t know someone’s preferred gender it was considered grammatically correct to use he to refer to them, even if they might be female. Based on the justification that ‘the masculine includes the feminine’, this means that all of the following would be considered fine examples of English…
-
MA students all pass with Distinction!
Myself, RóisÃn, and Gillian were delighted to find out last week that we all passed our MA Language and Linguistics degrees with Distinction. Our degree programme included taking a wide range of modules, followed by two terms spent researching and writing a 25,000 word dissertation. All three of us used this opportunity to conduct pilot…
-
Changing Climates and the Media: Lancaster workshop
The Lancaster workshop on Changing Climates and the Media took place last Monday (21st Sep 2015). This was a joint event organised by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) and the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. The workshop brought together leading academics from a wide range of disciplines – sociology, media studies, political…
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.