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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…
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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…
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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…
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25th Anniversary Conference for the Muslim News
I was honoured to attend the 25th Anniversary Conference for the Muslim News on the 15th September. The event was organized by the Society of Editors and the Daily Telegraph had provided the venue – the spectacular Merchant Taylor’s Hall in the City of London. The event began with a speech by the Bob Satchwell,…
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CL2015 – Presenting for the First Time at an International Conference
In July 2015 I was lucky enough to give a presentation at the Corpus Linguistics 2015 conference at Lancaster University. This was my first time presenting at an international conference, and I was nervous but very excited. I thought I would use this blog post to elaborate on my experience of presenting at a conference…
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“Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding” – The importance of language in the EU migrant crisis
With tensions over the current EU migrant crisis increasing, we at CASS thought it would be timely to highlight the importance of the language used in the debate about this humanitarian crisis. In this paper, by Paul Baker and Costas Gabrielatos, the authors analyse the construction of refugees and asylum seekers in UK press articles.…
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New CASS Briefing now available – Analysing narratives in the Corporate Financial Information Environment
Analysing narratives in the Corporate Financial Information Environment. Transparent and effective communication between firms and the investment community is a key determinant of corporate success. Audited financial statements and associated narrative disclosures are among the main methods that firms use to communicate with investors and analysts. These disclosures combine with information from financial journalists and other…
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Sino-UK Corpus Linguistics Summer School
At the end of July, Tony McEnery and I taught at the second Sino-UK corpus linguistics summer school, arranged between CASS and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. It was my first time visiting China and we arrived during an especially warm season with temperatures hitting 40 degrees Celsius (we were grateful for the air conditioning in…
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New CASS Briefing now available — Hate Speech: Crime against Muslims
Hate Speech: Crime against Muslims. The notion of ‘hate crime’ might conjure up an image of premeditated violence perpetrated by a bigoted thug. But in reality, a majority of so-called ‘hate crimes’ are committed with little aforethought by very ordinary people in ordinary circumstances and involve a verbal assault rather than physical attack. This briefing provides the key…
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.