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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.…
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Writing for the press: the deleted scenes
In late July and early August 2013, the stories of Caroline Criado-Perez, the bomb threats, and latterly, the horrific tragedy of Hannah Smith broke across the media, and as a result, the behaviour supposedly known as “trolling” was pitched squarely into the limelight. There was the inevitable flurry of dissections, analyses, and opinion pieces, and…
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Further explorations in ‘the Muslim world’
Doing a ten minute presentation is pretty tough – you have to be equally ruthless about what you leave out and what you include. But the benefits are potentially great – if you can present an idea well in ten minutes you are pretty sure that you will have your viewer’s attention. As anybody who…
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Web of words: A short history of the troll
Over the past fortnight, various broadsheets and media outlets (see bibliography) picked up the story of my recent article, ‘“Uh…..not to be nitpicky,,,,,but…the past tense of drag is dragged, not drug.”: An overview of trolling strategies‘ (2013), which came out in the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict. Of the thousands of comments collectively posted…
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.