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New CASS Briefing now available — What words are most useful for learners of English?
What words are most useful for learners of English? Introducing the New General Service List. Learning vocabulary is a complex process in which the learner needs to acquire both the form and a variety of meanings of a given vocabulary item. General vocabulary lists can assist in the process of learning words by providing common vocabulary items. In response to problems…
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New CASS Briefing now available — The EDL: moving right-wing populism online in the UK
The EDL: moving right-wing populism online in the UK. The English Defence League (EDL) is a far-right populist political movement and campaigns specifically on issues concerning the presence of Muslims and Islam in Western societies. This briefing from CASS presents the results of a corpus study on the online activities of the EDL and its…
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Brainstorming the Future of Corpus Tools
Since arriving at the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), I’ve been thinking a lot about corpus tools. As I wrote in my blog entry of June 3, I have been working on various software programs to help corpus linguists process and analyse texts, including VariAnt, SarAnt, TagAnt. Since then, I’ve also updated…
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The Scottish referendum – did it unite the Guardian and the Mail?
The Guardian and the Mail are very different newspapers. The Guardian is a left-leaning liberal broadsheet while the Mail is a more popular right-leaning ‘middle-market’ newspaper. Generally, they can be relied on to disagree with one another on a range of social, economic and political issues. However, both newspapers supported the recent “No” campaign during…
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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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In memory: Professor Geoffrey Leech
It is with great sorrow that we report the death on 19th August of Professor Geoffrey Leech. Geoff was not only the founder of the UCREL research centre for corpus linguistics at Lancaster University, he was also the first Professor and founding Head of the Department of Linguistics and English Language. His contributions to linguistics –…
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Gypsies, tramps and thieves? UK national newspaper depictions of Romanians and Bulgarians analysed
British tabloid newspapers repeatedly associated Romanians – but not Bulgarians – with criminality and anti-social behavior during 2012-2013, a comprehensive new “big data” report by Oxford University’s Migration Observatory shows. The report Bulgarians and Romanians in the British national press was undertaken by CASS Challenge Panel Member William Allen and Dora-Olivia Vicol at the Migration Observatory at Oxford University.…
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.