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Words, words, words: A new Frequency Dictionary of British English
If you want to know how frequently words are used in different contexts across speech and writing and with what other words these are associated, you might be interested in a new dictionary, which has just come out. This dictionary is based on the British National Corpus 2014, a large balanced dataset developed at Lancaster…
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Celebrating the Written BNC2014: Lancaster Castle event
On 19 November 2021, The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) organised an event to celebrate the launch of the Written British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2024). The event was live-streamed from a very special location: the medieval Lancaster Castle. There were about 20 participants on the site and more than 1,200 participants…
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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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Is Academic Writing Becoming More Colloquial?
Have you noticed that academic writing in books and journals seems less formal than it used to? Preliminary data from the Written BNC2014 shows that you may be right! Some early data from the academic journals and academic books sections of the new corpus has been analysed to find out whether academic writing has become…
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British National Corpus 2014: A sociolinguistic book is out
Have you ever wondered what real spoken English looks like? Have you ever asked the question of whether people from different backgrounds (based on gender, age, social class etc.) use language differently? Have you ever thought it would be interesting to investigate how much English has changed over the last twenty years? All these questions…
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Learn about the BNC2014, scan a book sample and contribute to the corpus…
On Saturday 12 May 2018, CASS hosted a small training event at Lancaster University for a group of participants, who came from different universities in the UK. We talked about the BNC2014 project and discussed both the theoretical underpinnings as well as the practicalities of corpus design and compilation. Slides from the event are available…
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The Spoken BNC2014 is now available!
On behalf of Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press, it gives us great pleasure to announce the public release of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). The Spoken BNC2014 contains 11.5 million words of transcribed informal British English conversation, recorded by (mainly English) speakers between the years 2012 and 2016. The situational context…
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.