Author Archives: langcorp

Corpus linguistics & applied linguistics 2022: Thanks!!!!!

It’s been an exciting edition with four amazing talks and great audience engagement. Over 950 listened to the talks online and almost 1,800 signed up to the webinars and webinars alerts. This shows the interest in corpus linguistics (CL) research methods and its impact on the wider field of applied linguistics.

In the 2022 edition, we have looked at the contributions of corpus linguistics in SLA and have come to understand some of the complexities involved in using CL methods in this field; we have dived into health-related discourses and how corpus methods afford extraordinary insights into the use of language to talk about and represent obesity and gender. We’ve looked at how fragmentary constructions are pervasive in English, and not only in spoken texts! We’ve also examined central and peripheral perspectives in researching migration-related discurses using corpora.

Thanks to our four speakers: Prof McEnery, Dr Brookes, Prof Pérez-Guerra and Dr Taylor. Their talks have inspired both early and not so early career researchers. Their insights have surely benefitted all of us. As one of the participants let me know: “These talks allowed me to listen to the people I read for my PhD and engage with them as if I was attending the conferences I cannot afford to attend myself”. Or this other testimony: “The event that you organized empower linguists to keep on doing research meaningfully”.

So thanks to the almost 1,000 people that attended the four talks and contributed to the conversation.

Thanks to our wonderful chairs Dr Pilar Aguado, Dr Joyce Lim and Ms Jiaqi Guo. I can´t forget here the support provided by the English Department at U. Murcia and the Facultad de Letras at U. Murcia.

Make sure you check out our series website and the 2021 and 2022 recordings.

We’ll hopefully see you next year!!!!

CFP 21st AELFE conference U. Zaragoza 28th – 30th June, 2023

This joint international conference brings together the 21st annual conference of the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes (AELFE2023) and the 7th Conference of the Asia-Pacific LSP & Professional Communication Association (LSPPC7). Both associations promote the use of languages for specific purposes and professional communication. The main goal of this joint conference is to create a meeting point for scholars (researchers and practitioners) and allow them to discuss and exchange their views on the conference theme with participants from different world regions and do so from multi- and inter-disciplinary perspectives.

URL: https://aelfe-lsppcconference2023.com/

Important dates

Deadline for abstracts: January 15th, 2023

Notification of acceptance: January 30th, 2023

Registration starts: January 30th, 2023

Deadline for early bird registration: March 30th, 2023

Registration ends: June 20th, 2023

Métodos de investigación para los estudios del discurso y de traducción

Seminario de investigación del grupo de investigación autonómico CIRES (Comunicación Internacional y Retos Sociales), de la U. de Zaragoza.

Métodos de investigación para los estudios del discurso y de traducción , 27 de octubre

Pascual Pérez-Paredes (U. de Murcia): “Lingüística de corpus y análisis de registros y géneros profesionales”

Julia Valeiras (U. Jaume I): “Métodos de investigación en análisis multimodal del discurso de géneros orales”

Noa Talaván (UNED): “Métodos de investigación en traducción audiovisual didáctica: el proyecto TRADILEX”

Miguel Ángel Benítez (U. de Zaragoza): “Métodos de investigación en detección de emoción y opinión en discurso propagandístico”

Corpus linguistics and the discursive construction of migrants

Online talk November 9, 12:00 (Madrid time) / 11:00 (UK time)

Dr Charlotte Taylor, University of Sussex

This talk is part of the Corpus & applied linguistics research 2022 online event.

Free registration link.

Abstract

The ways in which migration is framed in our public spaces influence who we think of when we think of migration, how we think about those people, and what kinds of responses are considered appropriate to their movement. In this paper, I want to show how corpus linguistics can be used to build a fuller picture of how migration is framed. I will start by addressing how corpus linguistics can help determine ‘who’ we should analyse when investigating the discursive construction of migrant groups. Then I will move on to what corpus linguistics, combined with discourse analysis can tell us about ‘how’ they are represented. Finally, I will discuss how we can use corpus linguistics to compare such representations across cultures and languages. 

Charlotte Taylor is Senior Lecturer in English Language & Linguistics at the University of Sussex. Her work is broadly concerned with language and persuasion and the rhetorical uses of language. Her current project examines the role of memory in migration discourses and unpicks the ways in which our contemporary public discourses both recycle past frames, and elide and re-shape past experiences. She also has a keen interest in methodological issues in corpus and discourse work. Her book-length publications include Corpus Approaches to Discourse (with Anna Marchi), Exploring Absence and Silence in Discourse (with Melani Schroeter), Patterns and Meanings in Discourse (with Alan Partington & Alison Duguid) and Mock Politeness in English and Italian. She is working on a new monograph titled Migration Discourses and Memory which will be coming out in 2023.

You can check out the 2021 talks here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKjKIIQL6u1mXD2V9ZaT-_Q/featured

This online event is organized by the Universidad de Murcia and the E020-07 research group (Lenguajes de especialidad, corpus lingüísticos y lingüística inglesa aplicada a la ingeniería del conocimiento).

A corpus-friendly analysis of fragmentary constructions in English

Online talk. October 26, 18:00 (Madrid time) / 17:00 (UK time)

Prof Javier Pérez-Guerra, Universidade de Vigo

This talk is part of the Corpus & applied linguistics research 2022 online event.

Free registration link.

Abstract
The concept of ‘fragment’ covers a wide array of structures of a very diverse nature, from interjections and headings to lists. In this talk, ‘fragment’ is narrowed down to encompass only stand-alone constructions which, despite their reduced, non-canonical, fragmentary structure, convey a propositional meaning comparable to that of complete sentences, as in Well done to Giles! and Good old Hendon next stop. The talk presents a theoretical (couched within Cognitive Construction Grammar) and an empirical characterisation of fragmentary expressions in contemporary English, based on the corpus analysis of sentence fragments in written and spoken English in recent diachrony (BNC1994 and BNC2014).


Javier Pérez-Guerra is Professor in the English Department of the University of Vigo (Spain). Javier is the coordinator of the LVTC (Language Variation and Textual Categorisation) research group in this institution, and the principal investigator of a number research projects funded by mainly the Spanish Ministry of Innovation and Science. His areas of specialisation are information packaging in the clause, multidimensional approaches to register variation as applied to earlier periods of English, the study of grammatical variation between Early Modern and Present-day English by means of computational techniques, and the impact of performance preferences and ease of processing on the design of grammars.

You can check out the 2021 talks here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKjKIIQL6u1mXD2V9ZaT-_Q/featured

This online event is organized by the Universidad de Murcia and the E020-07 research group (Lenguajes de especialidad, corpus lingüísticos y lingüística inglesa aplicada a la ingeniería del conocimiento).

Corpus Linguistics, Learner Corpora, and SLA: Employing Technology to Analyze Language Use

Online talk. October 5, 18:00 (Madrid time) / 17:00 (UK time)

Prof Tony McEnery, University of Lancaster

This talk is part of the Corpus & applied linguistics research 2022 online event.

Free registration link.

Abstract

In this talk I will explore the relationship between learner corpus and second language acquisition research. I begin by considering the origins of learner corpus research, noting its roots in smaller scale studies of learner language. This development of learner corpus studies will be considered in the broader context of the development of corpus linguistics. I then consider the aspirations that learner corpus researchers have had to engage with second language acquisition research and explore why, to date, the interaction between the two fields has been minimal. By exploring some of the corpus building practices of learner corpus research, and the theoretical goals of second language acquisition studies, I will identify reasons for this lack of interaction and make proposals for how this situation could be fruitfully addressed.

Tony McEnery is distinguished professor of Linguistics and English Langauge in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University and Changjiang Chair at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China. He has published widely on corpus linguistics and is the author of Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice (with Andrew Hardie, Cambridge University Press, 2011). His latest book, Fundamental Principles of Corpus Linguistics (with Vaclav Brezina) is due out from Cambridge University Press soon.

You can check out the 2021 talks here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKjKIIQL6u1mXD2V9ZaT-_Q/featured

This online event is organized by the Universidad de Murcia and the E020-07 research group (Lenguajes de especialidad, corpus lingüísticos y lingüística inglesa aplicada a la ingeniería del conocimiento).