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Spoken BNC2014 Early Access Data Grant Scheme – winning proposals
Lancaster University’s ESRC funded Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) and Cambridge University Press are pleased to announce the recipients of the Spoken BNC2014 Early Access Data Grants. These successful applicants will receive exclusive early access to approximately five million words of the Spoken BNC2014 via CQPweb. They will be the first to…
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Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language Project: A methodological journey
Just before Christmas 2015, the AHRC announced that it was going to fund the £1 million Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language project. I actually had the idea for the project 20 years ago. The fact that it took so long has much to do with method. The approach I envisaged for Shakespeare’s language is analogous to…
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Beyond the checkbox – understanding what patients say in feedback on NHS services
In 2016 I will be working on a new project in CASS, which has received funding from the ESRC (£61,532 FEC). The purpose of this project is to help the National Health Service better understand the results of patient feedback so that they can improve their services. The NHS gathers a great deal of user…
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Language Matters: Communication, Culture and Society
On 12th November, the CASS team made their way over to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester for the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2015. The theme for this year’s event was “Language Matters: Communication, Culture and Society,” and it featured a series of four informal talks by CASS researchers based at Lancaster. The…
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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…
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.