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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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CASS: Five more years
We are delighted to announce that CASS has been awarded £2.5 million funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Lancaster University to continue existing activities and pursue a new research programme for five more years, from April 2018 to March 2023. The funding, which includes £750,000 from the ESRC, will be used…
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CASS plays leading role in major European heritage language project
The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science will play a leading role in the new Heritage Language Consortium. The Consortium is a strategic partnership for the study of heritage languages in Europe and involves six leading universities in the UK, Germany and Portugal, as well as the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Through…
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Lancaster Summer Schools in Corpus Linguistics (#LancsSS18)
CASS is pleased to offer three free training events that cover the techniques of corpus linguistics and their application in three different areas. Corpus linguistics for analysis of language, discourse and society Corpus linguistics for language learning, teaching and testing Statistics and data visualisation for corpus linguistics The schools include both lectures and practical sessions that introduce the…
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Triangulating findings from a corpus-based study: An interview with Adil Ray (creator of Citizen Khan)
My doctoral thesis investigated the ‘Construction of Identities in the BBC Sitcom Citizen Khan’ by analysing a corpus of over 40,000 words, which consisted of transcripts from all the episodes of the show within the first two seasons. In my analysis, there were a number of instances where I had made some assumptions in relation…
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Media delusions: the (mis)representation of people with schizophrenia in 9 U.K. national newspapers between 2000 and 2015
In 2006, The Independent published an article advertising to its readers some of the islands off the coast of New Zealand as ideal holiday destinations. Amongst descriptions of various idyllic landscapes, cultural eccentricities and tourist attractions, the author warns readers of some of the local fauna:    “Wildlife-wise, there are not just hammerhead sharks in these…
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CASS in the 2017 ESRC Festival of Social Science
The ESRC Festival of Social Science is an annual celebration of social science research – comprised of a huge array of public events of all kinds, and designed to promote awareness of UK social science research across the board. This year, it runs from 4th to 11th November. As the team at ESRC says, “You may be surprised at just…
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.