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Using Corpora to Analyze Gender
I wrote UCAG during a sabbatical as a semi-sequel to a book I published in 2006 called Using Corpora for Discourse Analysis. Part of the reason for the second book was to update and expand some of my thinking around discourse- or social-related corpus linguistics. As time has passed, I haven’t become disenamoured of corpus methods,…
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Using version control software for corpus construction
There are two problems that often come up in collaborative efforts towards corpus construction. First, how do two or more people pool their efforts simultaneously on this kind of work – sharing the data as it develops without working at cross-purposes, repeating effort, or ending up with incompatible versions of the corpus? Second, how do…
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Trinity oral test corpus: The first hurdle
At Trinity we are wildly excited – yes, wildly – to finally have our corpus project set up with CASS. It’s a unique opportunity to create a learner corpus of English based on some fairly free flowing L2 language which is not too constrained by the testing context. All Trinity oral tests are recorded and…
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Two plead guilty over Twitter rape threats
Trial Tuesday 7th January saw John Nimmo and Isabella Sorley plead guilty to sending messages “menacing” in nature to Feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez and Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy via multiple Twitter accounts. In July 2013, Criado-Perez had been successful in campaigning for author Jane Austen to appear on the £10 bank note. Shortly after in…
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Translation and contrastive linguistic studies at the interface of English and Chinese
A forthcoming special issue of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistics Theory, which is guest-edited by Dr Richard Xiao and Professor Naixing Wei, President of the Corpus Linguistics Society of China, is now available online as Ahead of Print at the journal website. This special issue focuses on corpus-based translation and contrastive linguistic studies involving two genetically…
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A new version of EEBO on CQPweb
The version of the EEBO-TCP data that has been available on Lancaster University’s CQPweb server is now rather old (the TCP project adds text to the collection on a rolling basis), and, more importantly, does not contain any annotations. Recently I have devoted some time to running a newer version through UCREL’s standard annotation tools and then mounting the resulting dataset…
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“It’s all sex and celebrity now”: Page three corpus linguistics
On Monday (16th October) on page three of the Daily Mail, the readers could come across a short article about changes in the English lexicon with a title: “Forget supper and soup… it’s all sex and celebrity now”. (A longer version of the article is available online.) The article quoted some data from the New…
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CASS affiliated papers to be given at the upcoming 5th International Language in the Media Conference
In two weeks, several scholars affiliated with the Centre will be heading south to attend the 5th International Language in the Media Conference, taking place this year at Queen Mary, University of London. We are particularly excited about the theme — “Redefining journalism: Participation, practice, change” — as well as the conference’s continued prioritization of papers on…
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The New General Service List (new-GSL) is out
The new-GSL is an English vocabulary baseline intended for both researchers and practitioners. It is based on robust comparison of four corpora of general English of the total size of over 12 billion words. It contains 2,494 vocabulary items, 2,116 of which belong to a stable lexical core; 378 words in the wordlist represent lexical…
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Visiting With The Brown Family
In 2011 I gave a plenary talk on how American English is changing over time (contrasting it with British English), using the Brown Family of corpora. Each member of the Brown family consists of a corpus of 1 million words of written, published, standard English, divided into 500 files each of about 2000 words each.…
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.