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Jonathan Culpeper talking ‘Sarcasm’ tonight on The One Show
Sarcasm is one of the phenomena that seems to have endless fascination for British people, partly because they are stereotypically associated with it. When did sarcasm first start? Is there something about British culture that makes it flourish? And what is sarcasm anyway? These are some of the questions that Gyles Brandeth of BBC 1’s…
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Call for Participation: ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Science
The ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences was inaugurated in 2013; the 2014 event is the second in the series. It will take place 15th to 18th July 2014, at Lancaster University, UK. This free-to-attend summer school takes place under the aegis of CASS (https://cass.lancs.ac.uk), an ESRC research centre bringing a new method in…
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Rude Britannia – what our politeness says about our nation
Britain is still a nation of polite people and fears that texts, tweets and Facebook are making people ruder is a myth, according to research from Lancaster University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS). The British are famous for their reserve, indirect way of saying things and a love of queuing. However, new research…
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Politeness and impoliteness in digital communication: Corpus-related explorations
Post-event review of the one-day workshop at Lancaster University Topics don’t come much hotter than the forms of impoliteness or aggression that are associated with digital communication – flaming, trolling, cyberbullying, and so on. Yet academia has done surprisingly little to pull together experts in social interaction (especially (im)politeness) and experts in the new media,…
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CASS Q&A: “Part suspended” versus “Partly suspended” on the London Underground
Last month, I received an interesting email about some terms that London commuters might be very familiar with: We at London Underground currently operate the electronic service update board which indicates the real-time status of each of our lines. Most of customers are familiar and use it daily. We currently use the phrases – good service,…
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Official launch of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science
The official opening of the £4.1 million ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) took place on Tuesday, 23 July 2013, at the start of the seventh international Corpus Linguistics 2013 conference attended by more than 300 delegates. Delegates representing dozens of universities around the world convened with civil servants to honour the past,…
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The neglected west: first-order politeness in Britain
“Teaching and Learning (Im)politeness: An International (Im)politeness Conference“, will be held at SOAS, University of London, 8-10 July. I will be giving a talk with Jim O’Driscoll (Huddersfield) on the topic below: Almost without exception, it is scholars based in “Western” locations that have introduced the ideas with pretensions to universal application which are commonly…
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Call for Participation: ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences
We are very pleased to issue the first call for participation for our ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences, which will take place at Lancaster University 16th-19th July 2013. This event takes place under the aegis of CASS, a new ESRC research centre bringing a new method in the study of language – the…
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.