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‘Location, location, location’: Introducing corpus linguistics in a novel and interesting way
“Lancaster University is one of the places where corpus linguistics was born. Let’s travel back in time to the year 1970, six years after Lancaster University was founded…” This is a quote from the beginning of the first lecture of a new online Masters programme in Corpus linguistics, which invites the students to embark on…
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#LancsBox: The emerging historical linguist’s MO? A brief case study of Aramaic.
By: Charbel El-Khaissi I took Lancaster University’s free Corpus Linguistics course (Corpus MOOC) to fill time. Three months later, a doctoral research proposal enabled by #LancsBox, a software tool introduced in the course, was accepted at the Australian National University. For as long as this topic has been studied, ancient Semitic languages have relied on…
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British Muslims Caught Amidst FOGs – A Discourse Analysis of Religious Advice and Authority
By Usman Maravia In this blog entry, I will provide an overview of my latest article which explores the writing style of Islamic advice texts on COVID-19. The issues that were addressed in these advice texts were related to the topic of mosque closures, funerary rites, fasting during Ramadan, and suspending Friday and daily prayers…
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‘Face masks’ and ‘face coverings’ in the UK press during the Covid-19 pandemic: Scottish vs. national newspapers
Carmen Dayrell, Isobelle Clarke and Elena Semino (Lancaster University) 1 Introduction Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the use of face masks or face coverings as a means of reducing the transmission of the virus has been a major area of debate in many countries around the world. In the UK specifically, the first…
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Taking stock of 2020 and looking ahead to 2021
CASS Director Elena Semino reflects on CASS activities in 2020 and looks ahead at our plans for 2021.
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Introductory Blog – Hanna Schmueck
I am very honoured to have received the Geoffrey Leech Outstanding MA Student Award for my MA in Language and Linguistics. This award traditionally goes to the MA student with the highest overall average. I started my postgraduate journey in September 2019 after finishing my undergraduate degree at the University of Bamberg (Germany) in 2018…
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New CASS project: Feedback on NHS Cancer services
In recent months, CASS members Paul Baker and Gavin Brookes have embarked on a project working with the National Health Service (NHS), using corpus linguistics methods to investigate patient concerns in a large corpus (approx. 14 million words) of patient feedback on NHS cancer care. Below we discuss what the project will entail. If this…
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POS Tagging for Georgian is now available in #LancsBox
POS Tagging for Georgian is now available in #LancsBox We are delighted to announce that part-of-speech tagging for Georgian is now available in #LancsBox. This is the very first Georgian POS tagger made available for wide range of users and uses. It enables users to perform various linguistic analysis on their own texts or corpora…
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Representations of Obesity in the News: Project update and book announcement!
Gavin Brookes and Paul Baker We are delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of a book based on research carried out as part of the CASS project, ‘Representations of Obesity in the News’. The book, titled Obesity in the News: Language and Representation in the Press, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.…
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ICR Outstanding Corpus Thesis Award for Lancaster PhD graduate
I am honoured to have received the Institute for Corpus Research Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award. The purpose of this annual award is to recognise and reward theses in the field of Corpus Linguistics. I conducted my PhD research in the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University, which is part of Department…
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.