-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
In memory: Professor Geoffrey Leech
It is with great sorrow that we report the death on 19th August of Professor Geoffrey Leech. Geoff was not only the founder of the UCREL research centre for corpus linguistics at Lancaster University, he was also the first Professor and founding Head of the Department of Linguistics and English Language. His contributions to linguistics –…
-
Gypsies, tramps and thieves? UK national newspaper depictions of Romanians and Bulgarians analysed
British tabloid newspapers repeatedly associated Romanians – but not Bulgarians – with criminality and anti-social behavior during 2012-2013, a comprehensive new “big data” report by Oxford University’s Migration Observatory shows. The report Bulgarians and Romanians in the British national press was undertaken by CASS Challenge Panel Member William Allen and Dora-Olivia Vicol at the Migration Observatory at Oxford University.…
-
How to be a PhD student (by someone who just was), Part 3: Towards the viva
After successfully defending my viva early this year, I’ve been sharing some of the lessons I learned over my 38 months as a PhD student. In this installment, I talk about powering through your final year and preparing for your viva. If you missed the previous entries, click through to read Part 1 (Preparing for the…
-
Spoken BNC2014 project announcement
We are excited to announce that the ESRC-funded Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press have agreed to collaborate on the compilation of a new, publicly accessible corpus of spoken British English called the ‘Spoken British National Corpus 2014’ (the Spoken BNC2014). The aim of the Spoken…
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.