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Spoken BNC2014 Early Access Data Grant Scheme – Applications now open
Lancaster University’s ESRC funded Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) and Cambridge University Press are excited to announce the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 Early Access Data Grant scheme. Applications are now open for researchers at any level in the field of corpus linguistics and beyond to gain early access to a large…
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Corpus compilation: working paper now available
We are pleased to announce that the CASS Corpus on Urban Violence in Brazil is now ready to be analysed. It contains a total of about 5,127 articles (1,778,282 words) published between Jan-Dec 2014 by four Brazilian newspapers: Folha de São Paulo, Estado de São Paulo, Zero Hora and Pioneiro. This working paper explains the…
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Does it matter what pronoun you use?
Historically, in British English at least, if you didn’t know someone’s preferred gender it was considered grammatically correct to use he to refer to them, even if they might be female. Based on the justification that ‘the masculine includes the feminine’, this means that all of the following would be considered fine examples of English…
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Registration open for free upcoming event: “Language matters: communication, culture and society”
CASS is excited to announce an upcoming event at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester on Thursday 12th November from 4pm-9pm. “Language matters: communication, culture and society” is a mini-series of four informal talks showcasing the impact of language on society. The timely themes will be presented in an approachable manner that will be…
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Welcome to our newest CASS PhD student!
It’s the start of a new academic year, and the offices of CASS continue to get busier and busier! This week we welcomed our newest PhD student, Ruth Byrne, to the team. Here’s a bit aout Ruth and her research, in her own words: I’ve just begun the first year of my ESRC-funded PhD, and…
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MA students all pass with Distinction!
Myself, Róisín, and Gillian were delighted to find out last week that we all passed our MA Language and Linguistics degrees with Distinction. Our degree programme included taking a wide range of modules, followed by two terms spent researching and writing a 25,000 word dissertation. All three of us used this opportunity to conduct pilot…
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Changing Climates and the Media: Lancaster workshop
The Lancaster workshop on Changing Climates and the Media took place last Monday (21st Sep 2015). This was a joint event organised by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) and the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. The workshop brought together leading academics from a wide range of disciplines – sociology, media studies, political…
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“Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding” – The importance of language in the EU migrant crisis
With tensions over the current EU migrant crisis increasing, we at CASS thought it would be timely to highlight the importance of the language used in the debate about this humanitarian crisis. In this paper, by Paul Baker and Costas Gabrielatos, the authors analyse the construction of refugees and asylum seekers in UK press articles.…
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New CASS Briefing now available – Analysing narratives in the Corporate Financial Information Environment
Analysing narratives in the Corporate Financial Information Environment. Transparent and effective communication between firms and the investment community is a key determinant of corporate success. Audited financial statements and associated narrative disclosures are among the main methods that firms use to communicate with investors and analysts. These disclosures combine with information from financial journalists and other…
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The Spoken British National Corpus 2014 – project update
It has been little over a year since CASS and Cambridge University Press announced a collaboration to compile a successor to the spoken component of the British National Corpus, the Spoken BNC2014. This will be the largest corpus of spoken British English since the original, with the advantage of being collected in the 2010s rather…
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.