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A new addition to the Brown Family: BE21
Back in the 1960s, the Brown Corpus was the first corpus ever created – 1 million words of written standard American English from 15 registers, across 500 text samples, all around 2,000 words in size. Since then, there have been matched versions to cover the 1930s, the 1990s and the 2000s. Today’s reference corpora can…
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Coming this year: Corpora and Discourse Studies (Palgrave Advances in Language and Linguistics)
Three members of CASS have contributed chapters to a new volume in the Palgrave Advances in Language and Linguistics series. Corpora and Discourse Studies will be released later this year. The growing availability of large collections of language texts has expanded our horizons for language analysis, enabling the swift analysis of millions of words of…
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Brainstorming the Future of Corpus Tools
Since arriving at the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), I’ve been thinking a lot about corpus tools. As I wrote in my blog entry of June 3, I have been working on various software programs to help corpus linguists process and analyse texts, including VariAnt, SarAnt, TagAnt. Since then, I’ve also updated…
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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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Dispatch from YLMP2014
I recently had the pleasure of travelling to Poland to attend the Young Linguists’ Meeting in Poznań (YLMP), a congress for young linguists who are interested in interdisciplinary research and stepping beyond the realm of traditional linguistic study. Hosted over three days by the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University, the congress featured over…
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New CASS: Briefing now available — Opposing gay rights in UK Parliament: Then and now
Opposing gay rights in UK Parliament: Then and now. How has the expression of opposition to gay rights changed in Parliamentary speeches in recent years? How are discussions of gay people involved in these changes? To what extent could these arguments be seen as homophobic? Read this CASS: Briefing of a diachronic corpus-based discourse analysis to find out…
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Introducing CASS 1+3 Research Student: Robbie Love
In 2013, the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science was pleased to award its inaugural 1+3 (Masters to PhD) studentship to Robbie Love. Read a bit about the first year of his postgraduate experience, in Robbie’s own words below. I am a Research Student at CASS in the first year of a 1+3…
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Using Corpora to Analyze Gender
I wrote UCAG during a sabbatical as a semi-sequel to a book I published in 2006 called Using Corpora for Discourse Analysis. Part of the reason for the second book was to update and expand some of my thinking around discourse- or social-related corpus linguistics. As time has passed, I haven’t become disenamoured of corpus methods,…
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CASS awarded £200,000 from landmark ESRC Urgency Grant Scheme
CASS is delighted to announce a successful ESRC application for funding on a project entitled “Twitter rape threats and the discourse of online misogyny” (ES/L008874/1). The award of £191,245.25 was one of the first (possibly even the first) to be made as part of the ESRC’s new Urgency Grants scheme. Under this scheme, applications are…
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CASS affiliated papers to be given at the upcoming 5th International Language in the Media Conference
In two weeks, several scholars affiliated with the Centre will be heading south to attend the 5th International Language in the Media Conference, taking place this year at Queen Mary, University of London. We are particularly excited about the theme — “Redefining journalism: Participation, practice, change” — as well as the conference’s continued prioritization of papers on…
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.