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Sweepyface: a linguistic profile
This morning brought news of the suicide of a media-branded ‘troll’[1]. Brenda Leyland, the 63 year-old woman behind the @sweepyface Twitter account, a self-proclaimed “researcher” and “anti-McCann” advocate was found dead at a Marriott hotel on Saturday 4th October in Leicester. She was recently contacted by a reporter at Sky News regarding her Twitter activity…
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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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Introducing the Corpus of Translational English (COTE)
We are pleased to announce that CASS has recently compiled another new corpus, the Corpus of Translational English (COTE). The construction of COTE is supported by the joint ESRC (UK) – RGC (Hong Kong) research project, “Comparable and Parallel Corpus Approaches to the Third Code: English and Chinese Perspectives” (ES/K010107/1). The project is led by…
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Latest news on the CASS/iCourts collaborative investigation into the language of the law
Earlier this year, a formal collaboration between iCourts and CASS was signed based on our centres’ joint interest in the corpus-based investigation of language in the context of law. We are motivated to analyse legal data linguistically, because law is practiced in language, legal judgements are texts, legal arguments are phrases in texts, and legal concepts are expressed…
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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…
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.